2014: 45 books read. Favourite: Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus.
2015: 41 " " " : Dan Simmons, Drood.
2016: 42 " " " : Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall.
2017: 34 " " " : Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness.
In 2018 I read 56 books, one for each year of my age. It's quite a task, however it was made somewhat easier by my having broken an ankle in August so I was Off Games (I brought a note) and could catch up with my reading. So, which books made my Top Ten in 2018, and which one gets the ultimate
In no particular order, as they say on all the game shows, they were ...
Ursula Le Guin The Dispossessed. Anarres is a planet where resources are scarce and the residents must pull together or starve. Shevek, a brilliant engineer from Anarres, travels to Urras, a much richer society, and is dazzled and baffled by its abundance. Shevek is working on the Principle of Simultaneity, a means of instant communication across interstellar distances -- and a possible leveller. Yes, it's brilliant science fiction, but as with all good SF it holds up a mirror to our own times. But as always with Le Guin its the clear, lucid and dignified prose that shines.
Charles Dickens Great Expectations. When a serial in one of Charles Dickens' periodicals turned out to be a clunker, the master had to turn to in a hurry to rescue the magazine's sales and his own livelihood. You'd never know it from reading this melodramatic rags-to-riches tale, as on every page you feel you are reading a classic of English Literature. It's also killingly funny. I read this as it was one of Offspring#2's set texts for A-level. In fact, I read all her set texts so we could chat about them later, which we enjoy doing to this day even though she's flown off to college. Sniff.
F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby. The novel that epitomises the shallow consumerism of the Roaring Twenties in the U. S. and A., and can be seen, in a way, as a savage and less brittle counterpart to Evelyn Waugh's very English novels such as Vile Bodies. Amazed by how brief it was. You don't need to use loads of pages to tell a good story. This was recommended to me by my friend D. A. of London.
Neil Ansell The Last Wilderness. Few do rugged travelling like Neil Ansell. Now in his fifties and finding rugged travel to be taking its toll, Ansell returns to a part of the Scottish Highlands where he made his first trip into the wilds, as a very young man. Increasing deafness means that he strains to hear the songs of birds he has known all his life, perhaps for the last time. Beautiful and tragic.
Alex Clare She's Fallen. A guest at a wedding plummets to her death from a hotel balcony. Did she fall or was she pushed? Such matters are of secondary importance in this, the author's second policier featuring D. I Robyn Bailley, who is learning to live as a woman after deciding to change gender. The novel starts more or less where the first, He's Gone, ends -- and I don't think I'm spoiling things too much to say it ends on a cliffhanger. Can't wait for the third instalment.
Steve Brusatte The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs. Another Day, Another Dinosaur Book. This one, though, is written with such knowledge and infectious brio that it stands on top of the heap. If you read one dinosaur book in the next year or two, make sure it's this one. But only if you read mine first (it has better pictures). I reviewed this in the Literary Review.
Dan Simmons The Abominable. You won't read a more ripping yarn about the perils of inter-war alpinism this year. Or, perhaps, ever. Rich in detail, splendid in execution, this stirring tale of an attempt on Everest while trying to foil merciless gun-toting Nazis is as exciting as it is nostalgic (one imagines Tintin having similar adventures with Snowy, the Thompson Twins and Captain Haddock). Don't let the title fool you. This isn't a novel about yetis. Or is it?
Neil Gaiman Norse Mythology. My annual list is rarely without an entry from Neil Gaiman (or Dan Simmons, or Ursula Le Guin, come to that). Here Gaiman re-tells these misty old myths from the Creation to Ragnarok, most of which seem to involve Loki getting up to mischief and then having to find some circumlocutory way to put everything right. But such tales are in the telling, and reading this cast the same spell I felt as an eleven-year-old on first looking into Roger Lancelyn Green's Myths of the Norsemen. As enchanting as you have come to expect from this modern master of fantasy.
Alan Garner Boneland. I'd read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen when I was a child, but never read the sequel, The Moon of Gomrath. These two - well, the first, at any rate - concern the adventures of two children, a brother and a sister, when they come into contact with mythic ancientry in the landscape of Cheshire in the English Midlands.This, the third episode, concerns the adult life of the boy, who has become a radio astronomer and is trying to contact his sister, who it seems was astrally projected at some point in Episode 2. Not being aware of much of this, I read Boneland as a harrowing study of mental breakdown, written in the most extraordinary way, more like a prose poem than a novel. This was loaned to me by my friend Mr. C. F. of Cromer.
And the winner is ...
J. R. R. Tolkien The Fall of Gondolin. Recovering from trench fever after the Battle of the Somme, a young signals officer called Ronald Tolkien took an exercise book and scribbled a fantastic tale about a beautiful, hidden city assaulted and finally conquered by the forces of evil. The Fall of Gondolin was the first tale to be sketched in a sequence that eventually came to be known as The Silmarillion, even though the events take place towards the end of the overall story. Although most of the rest of The Silmarillion was sketched out in fair detail, evolving and maturing in all sorts of ways before Tolkien's death in 1972, Gondolin remained mostly unrevised, and although key to the mythos, much of it remains the youthful tale of heroic derring-do as it was laid down in 1917. It's one of literature's great tragedies that Tolkien - who could never bear to finish anything -- never finished this tale, the one that started it all, and from which sprang The Hobbit and of course The Lord of the Rings. Notwithstanding inasmuch as which, this edition is a tribute to Tolkien's son and literary executor Christopher, who has been ploughing through, editing and publishing his fathers' writing since the 1970s, and now -- at the age of more than ninety -- is hanging up his red pencil for the last time. This is the last that can be told of the matter of the Elder Days, in story or in song. Elegiac..
No comments:
Post a Comment