Books I Read in 2021
Folk Song in England - Steve Roud
An exhaustive, brick-thick account of how traditional vernacular singing developed in England. Entirely readable and rarely dry, despite its intimidating length. I play folk music - this is extremely useful for putting my hobby into some sort of context. I just wish someone had done an equivalent book for tune-playing.
The Magicians - J.B Priestley
I'm still chasing the high of Priestley's "Benighted", which is my favourite haunted house novel. This isn’t nearly as good: it’s a weird mix of post war upper-middle-class social realism and weird hippy mysticism, as a middle-aged industrialist finds himself in the middle of a hidden wizard war while dealing with the regrets of his past. There's something queasily judgemental about it, but it’s not without intriguing passages. Reminiscent of CS Lewis' "That Hideous Strength".
Dimension of Miracles - Robert Sheckley
A delightful romp. Very like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy in the way that it pitches a human everyman through a bewildering array of comedy planets and realities, and finds the structures of those realities to be meaningless bureaucratic lies. It's funny, and occasionally bursts into inventive, poetic flights.
Trafalgar - Angelica Godorischer
A raconteur in mid-twentieth century Argentina tells tales of his trading missions to outer space. A bit of a slog, but its best passages are reminiscent of Lem's Cyberiad.
One Billion Years to the End of the World - Boris and Arkady Strugatsky
A group of scientists finds that their research efforts are being impeded, and gather together to find out why. Is a conspiracy afoot? Russian black comedy SF, which dives into some pleasantly head-spinning ideas when it gets going.
The Hair Carpet Weavers - Andreas Eschbach
A wonderful piece of German SF: an isolated planet's entire economy and culture is dedicated to producing carpets made of human hair for a distant emperor's planet. Each chapter gives the perspective of a different character, as the book fills in the details of a strange culture and then pulls further and further back in a fractal revelation of its universe's frightening strangeness. In its humane uncovering of the mechanisms of an alien culture, it resembles Le Guin.
10 000 light years from home - James Tiptree Jr
SF short stories that are often oblique, cynical, difficult on a surface level. I didn't connect much to the spiky, brutal worldview, and it was rarely intense enough to be genuinely disturbing. (A contrast with, say, Harlan Ellison - I dislike spending time with Ellison's brute misanthropy, but he's undeniably good at upsetting you with the force of his personality). There is a really interesting short story about the effect of Star Trek's pop-optimism on an unhappy world: I haven't seen much written SF this early that deals explicitly with TV and film SF.
Cat's cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
Every few years I go back to Vonnegut and find his simplicity and directness annoying, but his moral core and inventiveness undeniable. As ever, this is acrobatic plate spinning, a despairing children's game, a lecture from a disappointed uncle, the inevitable unfurling of the apocalypse.
This Young Monster - Charlie Fox
A series of essays about outsider artists and people who shock society. I read it fast, and barely remember it.
It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track - Ian Penman
Really good rock journalism. Long essays about lots of people - it's especially good on James Brown and Prince.
The Hatred of Poetry - Ben Lerner
A clever, subtle piece of literary criticism that starts from analysing the reasons people hate poetry, and turning these foundations into a defence of poetry as an artform. Much smarter, more ambiguous, and more elegant than that makes it sound.
Surrender - Joanna Pocock
A memoir about two years in the American west, often spent with environmentalist or survivalist communities, reacting to the destruction of the land from pollution, climate change and loss of biodiversity. It is, often, extremely upsetting stuff - there are vivid passages about sexual assault and grief, all in the shadow of the dying days of the planet. At other points though, it is content to explore different ways of living in different sorts of places in thoughtful, compassionate ways. Fascinating, compulsive, bleak, emotionally difficult.
Pretentiousness: Why it Matters - Dan Fox
An argument that pretention is not a vice: that "pretentiousness" is an accusation levelled at people pushing themselves out of confining boxes, that calling someone "pretentious" is snobbish and classist, that "pretentious" behaviours are productive ways of moving oneself and culture forwards. Fun and persuasive.
Invisible - Paul Auster
An odd one: Auster remixes his usual box of tricks (lengthy descriptions of unusual books, people forced into ascetic lifestyles, clear cool prose, New York City) into a pool of unreliable narration. Sometimes this is a crime novel, a novel of political history, a pornographic novel, genres and levels of "truth" shuffled together like a pack of cards, but with no clarity about the end result. It's an intense, bracing experience, and you feel like you're in the presence of enormous cleverness, but you leave with an uncertainty about what it was all for.
Beowulf - Translated by Maria Dahvana Headley
The medievalists I know have mostly raised their eyebrows at this: there seems to be a consensus that this is less a translation and more a new poem using Old English bones. Still, this is the third translation of Beowulf I've read, and the first time I've really loved the poem. This version jumps between the vernacular and the High Poetic: it understands all the intoxicating appeal of Brute Masiculinity while also showing all its destructive effects. A jangling, charismatic poem, full of excellent monster fights.
The City we Became - N.K Jemisin
I've got mixed feelings about this, but I think that I didn't like it. In the Broken Earth trilogy, Jemisin used a fantasy world and fantasy effects to discuss power, oppression, violence, discrimination, history. Setting a novel in contemporary New York City removes the layers of metaphor and space for experimentation, and what you end up with is something comfortably doctrinaire, a book with ideas that are less about people and systems, and more about restating the beliefs of the contemporary American left. It's not even like I disagree with much of its politics, but this sort of polemic isn't what I go to fiction for. Perhaps it's simply not *for* me, and perhaps there is catharsis here for people living under the sorts of oppression the book discusses. There are certainly some fun magical battles. But overall, this felt like a book that was constrained by the politics it wanted to promote, rather than a book where politics emerge organically from the text.
The Lady in the Lake - Raymond Chandler
It's always tricky to write about Chandler novels, because in lots of ways they're the same as each other. They all have some of the best prose in the English language, are soaked in hardboiled noir atmosphere, are slightly messily structured. This is the fourth I've read, I love them all. This one probably has the tightest, most elegant mystery plot of the four: it's the first one I could imagine reading to work out whodunnit, rather than simply enjoying the smoke-stained night journey. But it doesn't have the soiled produndity of, say, "The High Window".
Noli Me Tangere - Jose Rizal
A nineteenth century novel by a Filipino writer, protesting against Spanish colonial rule. It became a central text in the Filipino independence movement and is now considered the national novel of the Philippines. There's a lot of Dickens in here: the social conscience, vast cast of characters, melodrama, wild coincidence, but it doesn't necessarily have Dickens' wit or charisma. For me, the first half was a bit of a slog, but the second half is grander, funnier, more eventful. It's also a fascinating window into a place, period, and set of political ideas that I knew basically nothing about.
The Doll's Alphabet - Camilla Grudova
Grudova clearly loves Angela Carter. Thankfully, so do I. Magic realist horror stories set in crumbling cities, full of odd half-broken mechanical devices and suffused with threatening sexuality. It's interesting to see this sort of story grounded in the feminism of the 2010s and 2020s rather than that of the 1960s and 1970s - the slightly shifted window produces a different set of effects and fears. The uncanny urban decay is also reminiscent of Thomas Ligotti and Bruno Schulz, both writers that I really like.
Summer - Ali Smith
The worst of Smith's seasonal quartet (my order of preference: Spring -> Autumn -> Winter -> Summer) - it is structurally and thematically diffuse, and was clearly hammered by COVID showing up (these are meant to be immediately contemporary novels; a lack of COVID would be weird, but it’s clearly shoehorned in here). Still, there is beautiful prose, warmth and decency, and moments of shimmering revelation.
Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants - Mathias Enard
A novella about Michaelangelo designing a bridge in Constantinople. It is atmospheric, enjoyable, well written, and pretty slight.
Chronic City - Jonathan Lethem
A meandering, stoned sitcom of a novel, about wealthy bohemian New Yorkers hanging around in a city prone to baffling animal attacks and hungry for supernaturally desirable pottery. It's funny, loose, and often infuriatingly vague, as events and conspiracy theories circle and repeat. Lethem is a big fan of Philip K Dick - and this is haunted by Dick's paranoia about shifting, unstable realities. But it's also - a lot of the time - just about friends sitting each other's flats and enjoying each other's company. I liked it a lot, even when it was annoying me. I missed the characters when they were gone.
Things We Say in the Dark - Kirsty Logan
Solid but unspectacular horror stories, often using feminist ideas in interestingly spooky ways. The best stuff is outside the narratives of the stories themselves: it plays clever metafictional tricks with its framing device.
Mordew - Alex Pheby
The blurb compares it to Gormenghast - it's never going to live up to that standard. But it is interesting: I'm not sure whether this is an attempt to write within the English fantasy tradition, or a metacommentary on that tradition. A young boy with hidden magical powers lives in the slums of a city ruled by an evil wizard lord. He falls in with an Oliver-Twist like gang of street urchins, and events turn towards the epic. So far so standard, but there's a distinctive amorality from every character here, a callousness about death and a frankly startling body count for a book that seems to be riffing on children's literature. It's also loaded with ephemera: notes sections, glossaries, essays about how magic systems function, all of which contain clues and hints about the world which aren't addressed in the main text. Some of this is enjoyable, some of it is a little dull, but I won't know what sort of object it's meant to be until the sequels are released.
Saturn over the Water - J.B. Priestley
An entertaining Graham-greeneish globetrotting thriller, with an idiosyncratic turn towards mysticism in its final pages.
Lucia - Alex Pheby
A modernist novel about the life of James Joyce's daughter. A lot of awful things happen to her, and there's a lot of textual experimentation and obfustication, but despite the bleakness and surface difficulty, this was surprisingly readable.
The Memory Police - Yoko Ogawa
The government orders the people of an island to forget objects and concepts; these objects then fade from the minds of the people who go on living without them. A small minority, though, are unable to forget, and the state tries to hunt them down. The metaphor is a little on-the-nose, but this is effective at presenting the slow cheapening and hollowing of a totalitarian state.
The Last Days of New Paris - China Mieville
A magic spell has gone wrong in Nazi-occupied Paris; it is inhabited by both the demons of hell and hallucinatory manifestations of images from surrealist art and literature. Now, the Nazis and the French Resistance fight across the nightmarescape. Mieville is very good at cities; he's also good at pulp that balances energy with ideas. There is a problem here: the creatures from Surrealist art in the novel have a bouncy, monstrous tactility, not the quiet subconscious menace you actually get from surrealism. Still, the book's concluding monster is an impressively horrible act of imagination.
The Liar's Dictionary - Eley Williams
Joyous. Two parallel strands: an awkward nineteenth-century researcher starts inventing imaginary words and hiding them in the manuscript; a modern-day researcher on the same dictionary is tasked with hunting down these entries and removing them. There's a delight in puns and language games reminiscent of Ali Smith. It is, often, achingly romantic. Full of elegant construction and sharp trickery.
Manalive - GK Chesterton
As ever, there's a lot to love about Chesterton. The verve and dexterity of his prose, the games and paradoxes, the moments of grand revelation. Here, a holy fool arrives at a boarding house, turns everyone's life upside-down with impossible pronouncements, and then is arrested for a series of terrible crimes that he may or may not have committed. In the end, it's a hymn to tradition, the family, the English way - and Chesterton is extremely moving when celebrating the values he admires. But the way of life he celebrates is a limited one, available to only a select few: his soaring rhetoric can't hide the fact that the book's Jewish or Chinese characters are unable to access the heaven granted to its middle-class Christians. As with any hymn to traditionalism, there's something grubby about the way the door is locked to those outside its worldview.
The Prince - Machiavelli
I enjoyed this: by stripping away any idea of ideology or moral mission, Machiavelli looks at politics as a machine, building a scientific theory of power that still works today. The worked examples from the classical past or 16th century Europe are a lot less interesting than the bits where Machiavelli just expounds. Its coldness is bracing, and I will certainly never be tempted to hire a group of mercenaries.
Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban
A journey through a post-apocalyptic England, told through an imagined future dialect. The language is a puzzle, a thicket to hack through, full of hints and clues, but often beautiful - especially when describing rocky rain-sodden landscapes. There's a lot of stuff I like in here: government by puppet-show, folk culture, hints of a deep and forgotten past. It is hard work, I know I missed a lot, and sometimes it was no fun at all - but I suspect that if I went back in a less distracted mindset I'd get a lot more out of it.
Peaces - Helen Oyeyemi
Oyeyemi writes novels that feel like collections of short stories, and collections of short stories that feel like novels. This starts off as a honeymoon journey on an impossible magic-realist art-deco train, but quickly slides into collections of memories, of odd documents, of disconnected happenings. I sort of wanted to spend more time with the train itself, but the book's move towards dreamlike unreliability is fun too.
Kanye the First - Sam Steiner
A play. Kanye West has died, but everyone in the world is hallucinating that a white English woman called Annie has the exact same appearance and voice as him. Annie doesn't understand why this is, but after her initial fear and resistance, she begins taking over the dead Kanye's life. It is digressive and exuberant and funny. If you are like me and enjoy both weird magic realism and the work of Kanye West, I would thoroughly recommend this.
The Topeka School - Ben Lerner
A novel that attempts to find the roots of modern American fascism in the author's 1990s midwest adolescence: religious extremism, male anger, male violence, the arid amorality of debating competitions, the impotence of basic decency when surrounded by monstrousness. It's really great - furiously clever and perceptive, full of seeming digressions that loop back round into shining moments of clarity.
Beware of Pity - Stefan Zweig
Hungary - just before the first world war, and a junior military officer becomes entangled with a local wealthy family. An intense tragedy of embarassment, as mortifying incidents lock the protagonist into deeper and deeper bonds of obligation, the strain and tension increasing at every stage. A precise, clockwork novel about a precise, clockwork time and place - it could feel artificial, if not for the deep waves of feeling on which the whole thing is built. I liked this a lot.
Tyll - Daniel Kahnemann
The story of a medieval performing fool - it swings between grubby, bloodstained realism and thrumming fantasy. It's patchy - as it moves back and forth through its protagonist's life, it sometimes feels like a collection of short stories, and some episodes are better than others. But the best sections are full of mythic power.
The Fortunes of Captain Blood - Raphael Sabatini
Pulpy pirate short stories from the 1930s. They're often fun: full of high-quality swordfights, trickery, disguise, and a nerdy delight in the functioning of ships. But a few of the stories treat slavery in extremely racist ways.
London Orbital - Iain Sinclair
I was interested in reading Sinclair due to his association with a bunch of big-name British fantasy and SF writers (Moorcock, Moore, Ballard). However, Sinclair isn't a fantasy or SF writer: this is a non-fiction travelogue of a walking tour around the M25. And yes, sometimes it's funny, it's always well written, there are some interesting asides and moments of quiet anger. But there's 550 pages of the damn thing, and I'm just not that interested in the M25.
Nightmare Alley - William Lindsay Gresham
Bleak, scrappy noir about a conman who starts of working at a travelling carnival, and later becomes a fraudulent medium. Some of this is unnerving and clever, some of it is silly and overcooked. Still, I had fun throughout.
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories - Ken Liu
This wasn't helped by a blurb covered in ludicrous hyperbolic praise ("One of the most lauded authors in the field of American literature", "One of the most-original, thought-provoking and award-winning short-storiy writers of his generation") - it's a moderately good collection of SF and fantasy stories. Very good on the relationship between East-Asia and the West, and on state violence. Its attempts to evoke an emotional response can sometimes feel manipulative and artificial, especially in the title story.
The Abstainer - Ian McGuire
A taut, propulsive thriller about the conflict between the police and Irish republicans in 19th Century Manchester. Especially good if, like me, you enjoy cities in the rain. Some more historical or political context might have made it feel deeper, but that's not the book this wants to be: it's a primal, nihilistic clash between violent men, and everything else is a distraction.
Wylding Hall - Elisabeth Hand
A haunted house story set in the late 1960s folk-rock scene, based loosely on the career of Fairport Convention. I am, therefore, at the direct centre of its target audience. It's rare to read a novel about musicians where the band feels convincingly real, and the supernatural stuff is pitched exactly right, full of half forgotten photographs in pubs, ancient barrows in the woods, and sinister manuscripts uncovered in the library of Cecil Sharp House.
The King in Yellow - Robert W Chambers
Four horror stories from 1895. An interesting bridge between late 19th century gothic and the pulp cosmic horror of the early 20th century. These aren't masterpieces, but at their best they are admirably dense with strange ideas.
The Ark Sakura - Kobo Abe
An eccentric has built a nuclear bunker in abandoned mine: it's a maze full of vast halls and secret rooms, and he's filled it with an impossible number of traps. Soon he is joined by a number of companions, whose motivations and identities shift in dreamlike ways. It is all an Allegory for Society, often uncomfortable and cruel. I liked the idea of the book more than I enjoyed reading it.