2010: 21 books, down from the 38 books of 2009 but a big up in quality. I started this reading year pledging to improve the overall quality of my reading matter and I’m pleased to say I stuck to it. I hope to continue this trend in 2011: quality over quantity. I’d still live to get a few more reads sneaked it but needless to say that my reading time is competing with my crafting time, so we’ll see which activity wins out in 2011..

The worst books: I always knew that the Julia Quinn novel, Splendid, was going to be one of my worst reads of the year. A book set in Regency London should properly not have its characters sound as though they lived in 1990s Los Angeles, full stop. On the other hand Splendid was not the spectacular train-wreck that Scarlett Thomas’ Our Tragic Universe turned out to be. I used to like her books until I realised she was essentially a one-note author hiding underneath a layer of pretend- counter-cultural-coolness – and Our Tragic Universe is not even that pretend-cool. If Julia Quinn is guilty of letting her cardboard characters slipping into a contemporary register, Scarlett Thomas is guilty of writing books she does not have the actual ability to write (I’ll come back to this point later when discussing another author). Finally, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go was a huge disappointment.

The honourable mentions: Glen David Gold’s Carter Beats the Devil was an entertaining book but one always destined to live in the shadows of Chabon’s superior Kavalier & Clay (one of my top reads in the Noughties). I finally got around to reading Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White which was good but not anywhere near as breathtakingly brilliant as Faber’s Under the Skin (see A Year In Books: 2009). Crimson was also “a novel thriving on exploring the dark side of society, and yet (..) polite enough to become a Sunday evening BBC costume drama” which continues to bug me a bit. China Miéville’s The City & the City was a clever, well-written novel fusing crime fiction and science-fiction. The book was a touch too plot-driven for me but I really enjoyed Miéville’s light writerly touches. Tom McCarthy presented himself as the heir apparent to James Joyce declaring his novel, C, to be ‘the Finnegans Wake for the 21st Century’. Utter nonsense, of course. I thought McCarthy guilty of the same crime as Scarlett Thomas: attempting to write novels that are outwith their novelistic abilities. Unlike Thomas, though, McCarthy can actually write and while C does not live up to its billing, it is a fine conventional Bildungsroman disguised as an experimental novel. At times it felt like McCarthy had written his book especially for me with amusing High Modernist references coming right, left and centre. C is an acquired taste, no doubt about it,  but I liked it a lot.

The very good reads: David Mitchell is one of my favourite contemporary authors and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet did not disappoint. It is densely plotted, well-written and I felt bereft when the book ended. Quibbles? Not many. At times you could almost see Mitchell moving his characters around as though they were chess-pieces – that may not work for everyone but I did not mind – and the pacing was occasionally uneven with some parts moving slowly followed by rip-roaring action. Colm Toíbín is another of my favourite authors and Brooklyn turned out to be one of the highlights of my reading year. I’m not much of an emotional reader but I connected strongly with Brooklyn‘s depiction of the émigré experience. Finally, on Lori‘s suggestion, I read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five over the recent holidays and I was blown away by it. It read like a heady combination of Nabokov and Alasdair Gray. Not my last Vonnegut book, then, and definitely one of the best reads of 2010.

I finished reading Tom McCarthy’s C the other week. It is quite a conventional book despite the breathless reviews comparing it to Finnegans Wake and French anti-novels – but despite its surprisingly orthodox qualities, I really enjoyed the read. It was a novel of ideas steeped in Modernist tropes and preoccupations: Egyptian fertility rites mingled with London soothsayers, merchants from Smyrna and Eastern European sanatoria populated by melancholic rich kids.

If I had been its editor, I would probably have edited out maybe thirty pages from the middle but overall I thought it a thoroughly entertaining read. I am not going to tell you that You Must Read This Book because it is definitely one of those books which will be an acquired taste.

Then I read Roald Dahl’s James & the Giant Peach in one go because I was sitting in the autumn sun waiting for some friends.

Next: David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I’m yet to read a Mitchell book I haven’t liked – although I am also yet to get beyond the first chapter of Number9dream.

Photo from St. Mungo’s Cathedral which I visited yesterday post-Dahl reading.

I have only read the first part – the part which outlines Serge Carrefax’ childhood – which is set amongst silk production, deaf children and mad-cap amateur scientists in the early parts of the 20th Century. Interestingly, this first part is strongly, strongly reminiscent of AS Byatt’s latest novel, The Children’s Book. The plot similarities are there: vague mothers, precocious children hiding in the woods, unsettling amateur theatre productions, bizarre charity work, and unravelling bohemian family life circa 1900. Stylistically the two books are oddly similar too and use many of the same tricks: fragments of verse flowing through the narrative, the dichotomy of muteness/speech, and a certain learnéd verbosity knowingly reined in.

I think the book might be about to change. Serge is heading for a sanatorium in Eastern Europe. I shall expect echoes of Joyce and Mann. So far I like C a lot even if it is not a high-flying avant-garde homage to Modernism but rather a literary book about ideas. I like literary books about ideas.

Incidentally, I googled Byatt + McCarthy and found this lovely review from The London Review of Books. I particularly take great pleasure in this tidbit:

Like McCarthy, I used to get exasperated by the self-impoverished narrowness of mainstream British so-called ‘literary’ literature, its obsession with Amises and McEwans, its deliberate ignorance of so much else; after a while, I realised this was not a literary but a cultic matter, to do with fertility rites and myths of social renewal. I remember that in the early 1980s on Channel 4 there was a chaotic late-night chat show, which my memory frames as having on it Vi Subversa from the Poison Girls, crowning Boy George as the young god of the year just out. As she did so, she warned him that the promise of regeneration embodied by his figure could be made good only with his sacrifice. As with hindsight, it duly was, as for Jesus and Osiris and Gazza and Martin Amis.

Recently I also found Sell the Girls, a blog entry about the old chestnut known as “dead white men and poor suppressed women writers”. I happen to like reading books and poetry by Dead White men and I’ve often had to defend myself against outraged feminist students who thought I was betraying my gender. Seeing as these outraged feminist students frequently did not show up to extracurricular seminars because they had to do the dishes before their boyfriends came home (true story), I rarely paid them much attention.

However, the blogger behind Sell the Girls is vastly more genuine in her outrage and brings her own experience from the publishing world to the table:

I suggest that perhaps what we ought to consider is the presentation and the representation of the female author, because—and I speak from hard experience here—a female author is simply marketed and presented differently. From the color and tone of the cover, to the review coverage, to the placement, to the back cover copy, to the general perceptions of female issues.

Jane Austen was “girlified” a few years back, of course and, famously, Joanne Rowling was advised to call herself JK Rowling or no boys would want to read Harry Potter. Other than that, I struggle to recognise a world where Dead White Men are taught to the exclusion of female writers. I remember being taught Mary Sidney, Lady Mary Wroth, Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft (and her daughter), Fanny Burney, Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot etc and that is even before we get to the 20th C. Maybe I was just lucky with my tutors.

Scatterbrained. I meant to say something profound about Sell the Girls but I lost it.

Fast-forward some five or six years.

Michel Faber’s Under the Skin, a ‘strange, disturbing, genre-defying short novel‘, turned out to be one of the most fascinating reads in recent memory (I must revisit it soon). Of course I am eager to read more books by Faber, and so another second-hand shop (in another city in another country in another life) delivers yet another copy of The Crimson Petal and White.  This time I bought it. It bears no resemblance to Bridget Jones, Dan Brown, nor The Celestine Prophecy. Instead it reads like Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet written by the step-child of John Fowles.

The Crimson is a Victorian novel written for the 21st century. Like Waters’ first few books, it explores the underbelly of Victorian society in a way that Charles Dickens could not: the prostitutes, the corpses dragged from the Thames, the blood, the gore, the shame. Faber has a writerly touch which infuses the book with tiny postmodern flourishes – an omniscient narrator breaking the fourth wall, texts within texts and many characters being authors themselves. His touch is light enough not to irritate, but occasionally it is almost too light:  mid-novel it almost disappears only to reappear just before the end. Knowing references to “proper” Victorian novels abound. Readers who have read Collins’ The Woman in White, Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Dickens’ Great Expectations will savour Faber’s small nods; readers who comes to The Crimson without any 19th C novels behind them will enjoy The Crimson as a rollicking good read.

And it is a very good read. I find it difficult to find faults with The Crimson, but at the same time it did not captured me in the same way that Under the Skin did. It is significantly less raw and more conventional (by current standards – certainly not by 19th C standards!). I finished reading it today and found out that the novel has been commissioned for a four-part BBC drama. And perhaps that sums up my sole problem with the book: it is a novel thriving on exploring the dark side of society, and yet it is polite enough to become a Sunday evening BBC costume drama.

Kimfobo at Reading Matters has a superb review, as does Tom of A Common Reader. Maybe The Crimson Petal and the White is still just  tainted in my mind by sharing those shelves with Bridget Jones et al all those years ago.

Let us recap what happened last time I read one of Ms Thomas’ books:

I do not know why I’ve read three Scarlett Thomas novels because if you take away the colourful packaging of a) metafiction (“The End of Mr Y”), b) anti-consumerism (“PopCo”) and c) popculture (“Going Out”) you get pretty much the same novel. New Age health solutions? Check. Schrödinger’s cat? Check. Main protagonist being into her math puzzles? Check. Slightly deviant sexual orientation painted in a fairly vague way? Check. C-category drug use? Check. Vegetarianism or some variant upon it? Check. Internet featuring heavily? Check.

But I still like her novels (..) even if they feel like a Linda McCartney meal. You know, easily digested vegetarian fare with a touch of celebrity to it?

Our Tragic Universe? It reads like a diluted version of the above padded with Narratology for Dummies, Tarot cards, jam-making and pages about how difficult it is to, er, knit socks. Everything falls into place once Scarle Meg figures out how to knit socks on double-pointed needles. I wish I were making this up.

Okay, a more sophisticated approach:

Clearly Our Tragic Universe wants to have a plotless plot or even be that paradoxical beast: an approachable antinovel. Whatever plot it has, it revolves around our protagonist attempting to write a hip, Zeitgeisty novel without a plot. Ah, funnily enough the novel itself mirrors the non-existing novel within. So far, so refreshingly clever (or depressingly metafictional, depending upon your mood). Sadly, Scarlett Thomas knows how to do this intellectually (we know this because the books bangs on and on about the theories) but her novelistic chops let her down.

Our Tragic Universe is a mess, and not even an entertaining mess.

Scarlett Thomas thanks Andrew Crumey in her notes. Crumey writes the sort of novel that Thomas thinks (or wishes or pretends because her books are all about pretending) she is writing. Go seek them out. I’m currently thirty pages into David Mitchell’s number9dream – he is that rare beast: an author who is a chameleon but also is constantly himself. Mitchell does marvellous things with narrative structure and is essentially a storyteller at heart. Another author I would recommend you read instead of spending time/money on Our Tragic Universe.

(Our Tragic Universe is actually worse than my other recent read, Julia Quinn’s Splendid, which is terribly sad because Splendid is set in Regency London and has characters slipping  in and out of 1990s Valley-speak.)

The Little Stranger is not Waters’ opus magnum. It is an uneven novel – less sure of where it is going than Waters’ other novels – and the dénouement will be too open-ended for some people. I really enjoyed it, in other words. Where once Waters threw Everything and the Kitchen Sink into her books, she leans back here and trusts herself as a writer. Her first two novels were particularly unsubtle, but The Little Stranger thrives on subtlety. I understand if other readers find its lack of resolve frustrating, but I would argue this may be the point of the novel. I said it of Alan Hollinghurst and now I shall say it of Sarah Waters: the Big Important Novel will happen at some point soon. As for now The Little Stranger has preyed on my mind that Waters’ other novels have failed to do.

I have not read anything else by Rachel Seiffert and the decision to read The Dark Room was a quick 8am “I have to have something to read at lunch” grab. Twelve hours later and the book is finished. Another uneven read, but unlike The Little Stranger, the unevenness stems from an author unable to join the seams and smooth out the kinks in her material. The subject, the effect of the Second World War on Germans, is too big and too complex for Seiffert. Symbolic gestures replace genuine characterisation – the disabled boy becoming a fervent nationalist; the collaborator standing in for an absent grandfather – and the entire novel falls a bit flat. I think the second story of The Dark Room‘s three would make a good companion piece to Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief, though, as they share similar characters and a similar setting, yet tell two quite different stories.

Next: I think it is time to move away from books set circa 1940-1950.

That is not to say that Nothing Ever Happens in Brooklyn. Eilis Lacey, our protagonist, goes to dances, finds a job, meets people and falls in love. Brooklyn has comedic touches too – some colourful characters, a baseball game, a stomach-churning journey across the Atlantic – but admittedly even the comedic touches are low-key. Oh, and there are some very, very big decisions being made by ordinary people in Brooklyn.

Brooklyn is about the the émigré experience. What does it really feel like leaving your country, your culture, your family and your friends for somewhere else? Reading Matters has an excellent take on this:

[Brooklyn] might be set in the 1950s but it touches on universal themes that resonate today, and I’ve yet to read anything that so perfectly captures the profound sense of dislocation you feel when you swap one country for another and then return to your homeland for the first time.

In short, Brooklyn is a superb paean to homesickness and the émigré experience. I think I identified with it so strongly because it shows, in an understated but powerful manner, how all emigrants have to make that god-awful decision about whether to stay or go (..).

I took my time reading Brooklyn, mostly because I did not want to become upset on public transport or in my workplace. I hesitate to use this word, but reading this novel was a profound reading experience – I put much of myself and my own life into it. It will stay with me for a long time.

I am now currently reading Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger. I have a little theory about Waters the novelist and so far The Little Stranger plays along with my theory. It is also very good thus far.

Only a handful of books make it to my all-time God-Awful Reads list.

Jonathan Myerson’s Noise is one: wildly inconsistent pacing, one plot dropped in favour for another as Myerson seemingly got bored with his original idea (or found himself incapable of writing the novel he set out to do) and a constant sneering, smug sense of contempt running throughout the book (the only consistent thing about it). Julian Barnes’ England, England is another. Barnes had two great ideas (England as a theme-park and a Baudrillardian take on said theme-park) but could not get them to work in the context of a novel. A cautionary tale that sometimes you need to write an essay rather than try to work your ideas out in fiction.  And then dear Ian McEwan with his Booker-winning Amsterdam, a book so contrived, self-indulgent and ill-executed that it has coloured my reading of everything else McEwan has written.

I think what bothers me about Never Let Me Go was the pointlessness of it. I cannot even pretend to loathe it as there is nothing there to loathe. I cannot point to any smug, self-inflated sense of importance (Myerson’s Noise), any over-ambitious intellectualism running rampant (Barnes’ England, England), nor any toe-curlingly bad writing and plotting (McEwan’s Amsterdam). Ishiguro’s book is just .. there. It doesn’t challenge, doesn’t engage, doesn’t take a stand and doesn’t make you think. I’m bothered by this (which could be argued is an achievement, of course).

By contrast I finished reading Larsson’s novel this morning having raced through it over the course of the weekend. Män som hatar kvinnor is not my cup of tea. I am a squeamish reader who does not enjoy reading page after page filled with gory details or graphic sexual encounters. I also had real issues with the main characters (the main investigator, Mikael Blomkvist, was an author surrogate; Lisbeth Salander, Blomkvist’s hacker sidekick, was a pile of clichés, or, as Joan Smith points out in her excellent review, ‘a revenge fantasy come to life.’). Having said that, the book made me care. I cared about finding old photographs and piecing together what happened one afternoon in 1966. The plot was convincing (if too gory for me) and unpredictable. Larsson’s real strength, to me, was his description of milieus: both the remote Hedestad community and the smart and educated Stockholm media intelligentsia were drawn with a strong, decisive hand. I do not think I shall be seeking out the two other books in Larsson’s trilogy – I’m too squeamish and not much of a crime-writing connoisseur – but if you like your crime novels smart, well-written and compelling, I’d recommend Män som hatar kvinnor in a heartbeat.

Next: I need to read a book written by a women, I think. Mantel & Wolf Hall, here I come.

I am knitting Larry out of British Sheep Breeds DK in Bluefaced Leicester cream and brown. The pattern is Janice Anderson’s free sheep pattern (pdf). I made a slight mess of picking up stitches around Larry’s face (the decreases stand out more than I’d like), but I hope it’ll even out once I stuff the toy. I’m knitting Larry on request, but I’m actually enjoying the process way more than I thought I would.

I’m really, really loving the BSB wool: it is a heady combination of the rustic wools I love so dearly (smells faintly of sheep, is unprocessed, comes in natural colours only) and the tempting butter-soft merinos I keep going back to (so very soft, feels great as you’re working with it, next-to-skin smooth). I had no idea it would be so fabulous, although my friend LH has been in raptures over it for as long as I have known her. I really have to knit a jumper or cardigan out of it one of these days. Srsly.

In very related news, my knitting bag is safe. Don’t ask.

I finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go on Friday and I was very disappointed. The book has a meaty subject matter and Ishiguro has the necessary writing chops, but instead of an “extraordinary“, “enthralling” and “masterly” book I was left reading a rather tedious, flawed novel. I get that Ishiguro writes about people unable to live full lives, people who are somehow lost (even to themselves) and people who are out of step with time. I get that he “writes like someone impersonating a realist” with resulting defamilarization etc. Still, the novel has an extraordinarily clumsy dénouement, the plot has numerous gaping holes and the writing felt lazy as though Ishiguro was painting by numbers. Never Let Me Go just did not add up as a satisfactory read and I am left wondering if the glowing reviews (and subsequent prize-nominations etc) were the result of Ishiguro’s reputation as an important British novelist or if I am losing my grip on what a good literary novel reads like.

Next: I have exchanged my book vouchers for Toibin’s Brooklyn and Mantel’s Wolf Hall. I even got Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo thrown in as a special offer, although I rather regret not getting it in Swedish (but then David would be disadvantaged).

I finished reading China Miéville’s The City & the City the other night, though. I had previously tried getting through Adam Roberts’ Swiftly (which felt like a disastrous date set up by an online dating agency based upon our preferences and demographics, but the spark wasn’t there and we disliked each other from the get-go) and Mark Slouka’s The Visible World (which I’m pondering giving a second go), so when I flew through Miéville’s novel, I was relieved. I’d recommend it – particularly if you like smart speculative fiction or want a detective novel with an added flourish – although it was a bit too plot-driven for my taste. Also, I liked Miéville’s light writerly touches such as naming the border area between the two cities “Copula Hall” (grammar nerd alert).

I’m now awaiting the paperback releases of Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn, Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and, of course, Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood. What books are you looking forward to reading?

Knitting-wise, I have made some headway on my summer top (now forever known as “Frankie Says..” and I’m showing my age) and I have cast on for a second pair of socks(!) seeing as my first pair are lovely, warm and perfect for snuggling up at night (again, showing my age).

And now it is time to do said snuggling under the covers with a book. Have a lovely Sunday.