A year of big books and little reading

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books of the year

It happened just before Christmas 2020. I got up early one morning, and felt as if I had walked into a meteor shower. I was beset by flashing lights in my right eye. I managed to get in to see my optician, and was reassured that there was nothing seriously wrong, and the problems in my right eye would settle down quickly, except perhaps for an occasional floater. (This proved absolutely spot on.) However, there was something worrying in my left eye: a build up of cells behind the lens that was put in when I had my cataracts done. If it got any worse, it could be fixed with laser treatment.

Over the next few months it did get worse, if I closed my right eye, everything I saw was blurred. As a consequence my eyes were tired more and more of the time, which in turn meant that I did less and less reading. It just felt like a strain every time I picked up a book. By late spring I was back at the opticians, and she got on to the NHS about the laser treatment. A couple of months later I got a call from the hospital to have my eyes tested. This confirmed everything the optician had said, including showing me an image of the build up of cells. Then I just had to wait for an appointment for the treatment itself. Which eventually came during the autumn.

Now my sight is more or less back to normal, and I can read without strain or tiredness. But during the long summer months something psychological was triggered, perhaps a knock-on effect of all the stresses brought on by the pandemic. I just didn’t want to read: I found it hard to open a book (almost physically so) and harder still to concentrate. That condition is, perhaps, beginning to ease no slightly right at the end of the year, though there is still a hesitation when it comes to picking up a book, even a book I’ve already started reading and which I am enjoying. One other thing I have noticed is that I find it far easier and more satisfying to read non-fiction rather than fiction, even though there is a pile of novels I very much want to have read. And I have, for whatever reason, turned to an awful lot of very long books this year.

The end result of all that physiological and psychological weirdness is that I have read no more than half the number of books I would normally get through in a year. Indeed there were several months in which I only managed to get through one book. There was a moment in November, after the eye operation, when I thought I would end the month having read nothing.

Still, I did do some reading, and as is my usual habit at this time of year, here is the list of what I have read:

Alastair Gray – Paradise: Posthumously published, this was the final part of Gray’s translation of the Divine Comedy. It lacks the interior illustrations, and I think the text would, in normal circumstances, have had at least one more going over by Gray, because the whole thing doesn’t quite have the zest of the two earlier volumes. But the fact that we have it at all is a wonder.

Susanna Clarke – Piranesi: I probably don’t need to add much to the praise this book has received. In fact I’m not quite as enthusiastic as some people seem to be, perhaps because I found myself distracted by too many echoes of too many other works. But it is an excellent novel.

Georges Simenon – The Flemish House: So we have continued the habit of me reading Simenon’s Maigret novels aloud to Maureen. The writing is astonishing, for books that are invariably 11 chapters long and 150 pages, he manages to pack in so much variety, so much observation, so much wry humour. They are an object lesson for any writer.

William Boyd – Trio: I do like Boyd as a writer, and this is, indeed, good, but not quite among his best. I wrote at greater length about it here.

D.J. Taylor – The Prose Factory: There is some interesting stuff in here, but boy do you have to search for it. Taylor is not a good writer, his interests are quite narrow, and he draws on the same examples time and again. But still there are bits here worth reading. I wrote about it here.

J.B. Priestley – An Inspector Calls: To my mind, one of the great plays. I’ve seen it on stage and screen and read it more than once. This time I was writing about it for Vector’s special issue on class.

Philip Kerr – A Quiet Flame: Kerr’s Bernie Gunther sequence is quite extraordinary, not so much for the crimes told as for the milieu in which they are set: the rise of the Nazi party, the mess of post-war Germany, and, here, the flight of ex-Nazi’s to South America.

Lisa Walters – Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science and Politics: Around this time I had been dipping in to Ritchie Robertson’s huge book on the Enlightenment (see below). While he didn’t refer to Margaret Cavendish at all, there was a point where he was talking about natural philosophy in the middle of the 17th century that made me think about Cavendish and her contemporaries. So this book, and the next two on the list, along with a host of essays and bits of other books and the like, were the necessary precursor to a longish essay I wrote about Cavendish, and which is due in the next issue of Foundation.

Kathleen Jones – Margaret Cavendish: A Glorious Fame

Margaret Cavendish – The Blazing World

Bae Myung-Hoon – Tower: The travails of the year left me less able to read science fiction than any other form of fiction. But this was one of the few exceptions, a superb book that I reviewed for Strange Horizons.

Peter Hennessy – Winds of Change: Another of Hennessy’s rather dense political histories. In this instance he covers the few years of Tory (mis)rule between the start of the Sixties and Harold Wilson’s election triumph. As so often with Hennessy there is rather too much detail about who said what in Cabinet, and not quite enough about the social context in which these events happened. The Profumo Affair, for instance, seems to happen in a cultural vacuum unconnected to social and sexual changes that were starting to take place. And being Hennessy he is rather more forgiving of the Tories than I would be. But there is still a lot of interesting stuff in here.

Georges Simenon – The Madman of Bergerac

Richard Thompson – Beeswing: One of the best autobiographies by a musician that I’ve read. I wrote about it here.

Helen MacInnes – Ride a Pale Horse: Maureen, who has been dutifully buying me a new Helen MacInnes for every gift0giving opportunity, informs me that I am now nearing the end. But still there are books I’d not encountered before for me to enjoy.

Helen Fry – MI9: This should have been so good, only it wasn’t, as I say here.

Kazuo Ishiguro – Klara and the Sun: I reviewed this novel for Strange Horizons. I was more generous to the book than just about any other sf critic I read; but I was more critical of the book than just about any mainstream reviewer I read. The thing is, there are two scenes around the mid-point of the novel that are extraordinarily good, but then the whole thing fizzles out into one of the most awful endings you are likely to encounter. So it goes.

David Edmonds – The Murder of Professor Schlick: During the summer I got into some rather heavy books on philosophy, of which this was perhaps the lightest but also the best. It helped to generate this post on the subject.

Peter Carey – The Chemistry of Tears: I love most (though not quite all) of Carey’s work, and I had been meaning to read this novel for years without ever actually getting around to it. So this year I made certain, and it is good. Not his best, but very good.

Kate Atkinson – Behinds the Scenes at the Museum: Atkinson has, ever since Life After Life, become one of my favourite novelists, but I had for some reason never gout around to reading her first novel. I’m glad I’ve done so now, it really is excellent.

Wolfram Eilenberger – Time of the Magicians: The other big book on philosophy that I read during the summer (and yes, I also cover it in this post).

Georges Simenon – The Misty Harbour

Georges Simenon – The Man From London: This was a bit of an experiment, one of Simenon’s non-Maigret novels, to see if I got along with it as well as Maigret. Many, many years ago, I tried reading a Simenon, The Brothers Rico, and didn’t get on with it at all, so I was interested to see what the difference was. In fact this is much the same length as a Maigret novel, as tightly written as a Maigret novel, but it is darker, a sense of doom hangs about the characters right from the start. I did enjoy it, though.

Ritchie Robertson – The Enlightenment: It took me months to work my way through this book. It is huge and dense and complex. And it is fascinating. Some of the thoughts inspired by the book came out in this post.

Ivy Roberts (ed) – Futures of the Past: An oddly haphazard collection of early science fiction that I was asked to review for Vector. I wrote a longish review, around 1,500 words, but happened to mention in passing that my notes on the book were much longer. Which is how come an essay of somewhere around 5,000 words will be coming to a Vector near you in the not too distant future.

Rosemary Hill – Time’s Witness: Another dense book, if not quite so long as The Enlightenment. This is a study of antiquarianism in Britain and France between, roughly, the French Revolution and the Great Exhibition. It is fascinating for the way it reveals how our views of the past have changed over the years.

Michael Walker – Laurel Canyon: Between the late-1960s and the mid-1970s, Laurel Canyon, just outside Los Angeles, became home to a startling variety of rock stars, including Mama Cass, Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa, and a host of others, some more temporary than others. Given that the canyon is not too far from the Troubadour, the whole area became a crossroads for rock musicians of every kind. This is an occasionally breathless, often starry-eyed account of the whole phenomenon, and its rather sad ending, but the whole book is great fun.

Helen MacInnes – Neither Five Nor Three: If you had asked me, I would have sworn that this was the MacInnes novel I had read on a trip to Greece in the early 70s, and that a Greek Orthodox priest I met on a train to Mycenae used to practice his (atrocious) English pronunciation. Yet when I read the book now I didn’t remember a single thing about the story. Was my memory at fault?

Octavia Cade – The Impossible Resurrection of Grief: a novella that I reviewed for Strange Horizons and which I can’t help feeling should have been longer.

David Edmonds and John Eidinow – Wittgenstein’s Poker: Effectively the precursor to Edmonds’s The Murder of Professor Schlick, though there is considerable overlap between the two works. This begins with the only meeting between Wittgenstein and Karl Popper (the two philosophers who were central to my own philosophy studies), at which the two disagreed so violently that Wittgenstein allegedly threatened Popper with a poker.

Georges Simenon – Liberty Bar

Robert Holdstock – Mythago Wood: How many times have I read this now? This time I was making notes for the book about Mythago Wood that I need to begin writing in the next few days. There is always more to discover in the book, it really is fantastic.

Georges Simenon – Lock No.1: This is the novel in which Maigret announces that he is about to retire. Every Maigret novel to this point (this is number 18) was written in a very brief period, 1932 and 1933. The next novel, just called Maigret, came out in 1934 and features Maigret in retirement, but then there is a gap in the chronology. So I’m guessing that this was the point at which Simenon decided that his creation had to encounter his own Reichenbach Falls, only, like Doyle before him, Simenon discovered that he couldn’t quite pull the trigger.

Louis Menand – The Free World: This is easily the biggest of the big books I read this year, over 700 pages of rather dense text. It is subtitled “Art and Thought in the Cold War”, though it brings the story to a close with the Vietnam War, twenty years before the Cold War itself ended. It is an excellent if at times frustrating book. For well over half the book each new chapter takes a different focus, and usually presents it in relation to one figure: George Kennan, George Orwell, Jean Paul Sartre, Claude Levi Strauss, Merce Cunningham, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, the Beatles and so on. (Much of this is covered in the piece I wrote here, at around the half way mark in the book.) But then, suddenly, he starts linking these characters, so that the picture he is presenting in such careful detail starts to become ever more complex. And after complaining that all of his central figures are men we suddenly come upon a chapter which explains why, which points out how women were systematically obscured during this period, how the number of women in universities, the professions, branches of government and so forth was actually less in the 1960s than it had been in the 1920s. It is a huge and powerful book, there’s a lot to take in and nobody is going to agree with everything in the book, but as a springboard for ideas it is unrivalled.

Michael O’Neill – Joni Mitchell: Lady of the Canyon: The book is worth it for the photographs, but the text? It is basically a loose, flaccid essay that tries to encompass the whole of her life and career in no great depth. O’Neill is best in his thumbnail reviews of the various albums, but there is no detail and no insight here. And it is very careless, at one point he talks of a concert “the day after her prison episode” (69) without actually saying anywhere what this “prison episode” might be. Everything is brushed over quickly, lightly, the many quotations are never sourced. It is just sloppy work. (For comparison, this essay says more, more interestingly, about Joni Mitchell, and isn’t that much shorter than O’Neill’s book.)

Rob Young – The Magic Box: I loved Young’s book on folk music, Electric Eden, so I was anxious to see what he made of this book on British film and television. I wasn’t disappointed. It is clearly intended as a companion volume to Electric Eden, because the cross-references are immense. But I hadn’t taken into account how much of the book would be about folk horror with constant reference to the way themes like alien invasion, horrors rising from the ground, and secret societies all reflect social and cultural conditions within Britain at the time. I kept stumbling across ideas that made me go: oh, yes, I need to remember this when I’m writing about X or Y or … This is, I think, a book I will come back to on many occasions.

And that’s it, a very poor 36 titles in all (though there are half a dozen title in there that are particularly long, and the Menand probably counts as three normal books). I don’t think any of the books I have on the go at the moment will be finished before the end of the day, so I might as well close this list now and post it.

Other news: I’ve now read the final proofs and written the index for the book on Brian Aldiss, and that is on schedule to appear in July. Before that, in May, I am due to deliver the manuscript for a book about Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood. I’m going to be starting to write that in the next week. I have a proposal for another book, which I need to revise and submit also during January. Meantime the next issue of Foundation will have getting on for 8,000 words on Margaret Cavendish from me, and then there is the long review essay on Futures of the Past that is die to appear in Vector sometime during the year. So on a writing front, things have kept going at a steady pace, and I just hope it continues like that over the next year.

And that was the year that was

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books of the year

End of the year, and as I do every year I am producing a write-up on all the books I’ve read during the year. Except, this wasn’t every year, this was a weird, misshapen beast of a year. Superficially, my life during lockdown wasn’t all that different from my life in any other recent year. But there were differences, things that were missed, things that became out of reach, things that were suddenly more stressful than usual, indeed more stressful than they had any right to be. On top of which we had the inestimable joy of seeing in vivid highlight just how mad and incompetent and uncaring our political masters actually are. It was a year that attacked us, a year we didn’t just have to endure but actually had to fight back against. And out of it all? Well, I spent more of the year feeling worn down, mentally exhausted, than I think I’ve ever known before. Which is not exactly good for getting lots of reading done.

I’ve spent much of the year seeing people talk about how lockdown has allowed them to get more reading than ever done. And it’s like I’m reading something in a foreign language. I simply don’t understand what they are saying. It has been a terrible year for reading. I had no patience for most of the books that came my way; far more books than usual were tossed aside unfinished. And when I did persevere I found it harder than ever to concentrate, so I read less more slowly. What worked for me was not exactly comfort reading, I didn’t turn back to old favourites, in fact I didn’t re-read much of anything during the year. But I did find that crime worked for me better than most other forms of fiction, particularly the Maigret novels by Georges Simenon which I discovered for the first time this year. And I was turning more than ever to non-fiction, perhaps because of the way the best non-fiction engages the intellect.

Anyway, this is the much-reduced list of all the books I finished during the year. As usual, I’ve put the books that I particularly recommend in bold.

1: Aldiss Unbound – Richard Mathews: The first month or so of the year was taken up with last-minute reading for my own book on Aldiss. The first three titles on this list are the three previous books on Aldiss, which seem to be trying to out-do each other in how unquestioningly they adore everything the man ever wrote. I can only hope that my own book has managed to inform the work with a more critical perspective than any of these three managed.

2: Apertures – Brian Griffin & David Wingrove.

3: Brian Aldiss – Michael R. Collings.

4: Enemies of the System – Brian Aldiss: And there were also three books by Aldiss that I had to catch up with at the last minute, two of which, at least, were indicative of just how bad some of his work could be.

5: Memories of the Future – Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky which I’ve already written about here.

6: Brothers of the Head – Brian Aldiss.

7: Super-State – Brian Aldiss.

8: We Danced All Night – Martin Pugh: I am more and more fascinated by British social history, particularly of the twentieth century, and this is one of the best I have encountered. It is an extraordinary account of that twenty-year period between the two world wars, and, unusually for histories of that period, it gives an unusual emphasis to the lives of women in that time.

9: Memories of the Future – Siri Hustvedt which I wrote about here along with the identically titled collection by Krzhizhanovsky.

10: Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel – Caroline Edwards which I reviewed (very favourably) for Science Fiction Studies.

11: Here We Are – Graham Swift which I wrote about here.

12: Tombland – C.J. Sansom: The last, or at least last-to-date, of Sansom’s novels about the Tudor lawyer and investigator, Matthew Shardlake, and following the pattern of the earlier volumes, it is also the longest of the books. By now, Henry VIII is dead and Shardlake is working for the Princess Elizabeth, a perilous occupation given how out-of-favour Elizabeth is at the court. But a bizarre murder involving a distant Boleyn relative sends Shardlake to Norwich just in time to get caught up in Kett’s Rebellion. As always with Sansom the pleasure is in the detailed recreation of historical events, and the atmospheric presentation of the social reality of daily life at that time.

13: Double Cross – Ben MacIntyre: There is something terribly British about the fact that the double cross operation they ran with turned German spies during World War II was under the control of a group called the Twenty Committee (Roman numerals: XX); and there is something terribly German about the fact that, though they must learned the name of that committee, the German spymasters never twigged to what it signified. Though I do find myself wondering whether the Abwehr (mostly staffed by aristocrats who were not exactly pro-Nazi) was knowingly turning a blind eye to what was going on. If there wasn’t some level of complicity, they were woefully incompetent. Every single German spy sent to Britain during the war was captured, and a number were turned; though the double cross network was mostly made up of people who approached the British independently. There are questions about exactly how much influence the double cross spies had on the course of the war, but it is pretty clear that they fed the German High Command with what they wanted to hear, so they were simply confirming expectations when they revealed that there were twice as many troops in Britain as were in truth present, and when they said that the Normandy landings were just a feint before the real invasion at Pas de Calais. Hitler in particular was so convinced of this last that he held troops in place at Calais for almost twenty days after the Allies had come ashore at Normandy.

14: The Light of Day – Eric Ambler: This was the novel that inspired the film Topkapi, though in truth the novel is a richer and more complex work, and the unreliable narrator of the novel is a far funnier and more nuanced character than Peter Ustinov who plays him in the film.

15: The Farthest Shore – Ursula K. Le Guin: I’ve been reading the Earthsea Trilogy aloud to Maureen off and on for the last few years, mostly limited to a chapter or two as entertainment on long car journeys. This is easily my least favourite of the three.

16: The Late Monsieur Gallet – Georges Simenon: Many years ago, I tried reading some of Simenon’s non-Maigret novels and couldn’t get on with them. I think Maureen had a similar experience. But we have both enjoyed radio and television dramatizations of the Maigret stories (I have fond memories of Rupert Davies in the 1960s, and we have both enjoyed the Rowan Atkinson incarnation), and sometime late last year or early this year Maureen decided she would give the Maigret novels a go. She enjoyed them a lot, but she also thought they would work well being read aloud. So, having finished the Le Guin, we picked up this one. It remains, a dozen or so Maigret novels later, my favourite of them, but there isn’t a bad one in the bunch, and they are wonderful to read aloud. I love the fact that they are all very carefully structured, all 145-155 pages long, all consist of 11 chapters, the last of which is always about half the length of any other. And yet, within those constraints, and despite the speed with which they were written (about 10 in 1932 alone), they never feel mechanical. The nature of the crime, Maigret’s relationship to the crime, the circumstances, the setting, the social environment within which it all occurs, always vary from novel to novel.

17: Aiding and Abetting – Muriel Spark: I love Spark’s work, but this is a late and decidedly minor work. It consists of a novella and a novelette (the novella is late, the novelette, I think, quite early). The novella concerns a psychiatrist in Paris, two of whose patients both claim to be Lord Lucan (the minor aristocrat and gambler who murdered his children’s nanny, presumably mistaking her for his wife, then fled the country never to be seen again). Since the psychiatrist is also living under a false name, there is some interesting stuff about identity going on here, but it never quite seems to hit the heights the way you’d expect of Spark.

18: The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien – Georges Simenon.

19: The Carter of La Providence – Georges Simenon.

20: The Pale Criminal – Philip Kerr: The second of the Bernie Gunther Trilogy, this time investigating murders that bring him up against the anti-Jewish policies and beliefs of the Nazi regime.

21: H.G. Wells: A Literary Life – Adam Roberts which I reviewed for Foundation.

22: The Yellow Dog – Georges Simenon.

23: A German Requiem – Philip Kerr: I’m not exactly sure why, but the first three of the novels Kerr wrote about his German detective are known as the Bernie Gunther Trilogy, as is they are somehow separate from all the other Bernie Gunther novels that Kerr has written, despite the fact that the fourth volume, The One from the Other, is a direct sequel to this novel, which is the third part of the trilogy. In fact, there is more connection between A German Requiem and its sequel than there is with the two novels that precede it. In those two Gunther is a Berlin detective in Nazi Germany; in A German Requiem the war is over and Gunther finds himself in Vienna, though the case he is investigating has its inevitable links to the Nazi regime.

24: Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and the Twentieth Century – Sarah Cole: also reviewed for Foundation. This is one of the best books on Wells I have read for a long time, examining his sometimes fraught relationship with the modernist writers of his time, and suggesting that his work was more modernist, and more worthy of examination than we tend to assume.

25: Utopia Avenue – David Mitchell: As we have come to expect of Mitchell, there are two bits of story going on here. One is the long story that ties this novel to everything else he has written: the two schools of immortality at war in the background. In some of his novels (The Bone Clocks, Slade House) this over-arching fantasy is the main focus of the work, but here I find it far and away the least interesting part of what is going on. The other story is about the rise and fall of a rock group in the late-1960s, and this I found absolutely entrancing. It may be because this is my musical era, many of the performers who have walk-on parts in the novel were among my favourite artists at the time. The novel is littered with quotations from the songs of the period, some overt, many not, and they filled my head with exactly the music of the group Utopia Avenue. I recognized the group even if it never actually existed: bits of early Fairport perhaps and Pentangle, mixed with The Animals, maybe, and a soupcon of The Kinks? Folk and rock just at the time they were learning to live together. To that degree, therefore, I find this an excellent historical novel.

26: Utopia: The History of an Idea – Gregory Claeys: And another, different, utopia. Except that this book is a mess, a confusion of ideas and there are major parts of the book where the only reason I understood what was going on was because I already knew about it before I picked up this book.

27: Night at the Crossroads – Georges Simenon.

28: The Last Astronaut – David Wellington: I read this because it was on the Clarke Award shortlist, and because it is the one book on that list that I hadn’t seen mentioned anywhere else (after I read it I came across Nina Allan’s evisceration of the book, which says much of what I say here). I wondered if this was the book that had slipped through the net, but that deserved better. All I can say is: what the fuck were the Clarke jurors thinking? It’s not a bad book, but it’s a book that positions sf firmly back in the 1960s. To be specific, it is Rendezvous With Rama dressed up for a new audience. For me, the point of science fiction is to confront the new, to make us see something afresh. An award should recognise a work that pushes the envelope, that takes sf in a new direction. That new direction is not backwards. The Last Astronaut is almost shameless in the way it steals from Rendezvous With Rama. An object enters the solar system, and starts to slow down. NASA has been wound down over the decades, so their only option for exploring the alien object is a mothballed spaceship and a disgraced ex-astronaut. When the astronaut and her crew enter the object, you’ve got all the basics of Rama repeated: a frozen landscape that slowly comes to life, objects that are mysterious and unlike anything we know on earth. There aren’t the tripods, but there is the icefield that melts to become the equatorial ocean. Wellington takes the easy option of making all this threatening rather than just mysterious. Characterisation is perfunctory: the central figures are each defined by just one thing, and show no more growth or complexity than that. There are convenient devices available just when they are needed. There’s something mechanical about the whole enterprise (both within the story and in the writing of it).
There are many worse books about, true, but if this is the sort of book that should be considered for an sf award, then science fiction has gone into reverse.

29: Pietr the Latvian – Georges Simenon.

30: The Code Book – Simon Singh: My interest in deception and espionage in World War II has inevitably come around to the issue of codes and cyphers and cryptanalysis. The Code Book has been on our shelves for years, so it seemed like a good idea to pick it up. It covers the whole history of codes from Biblical times to Enigma and beyond, so it is not especially deep on any part of that history, but it does seem like a good general introduction to the subject.

31: The Grand Banks Cafe – Georges Simenon.

32: A Crime in Holland – Georges Simenon.

33: The Future of Another Timeline – Annalee Newitz: Well, at least I managed to pursue this to the end, unlike so many of the other highly-praised novels of the year that were discarded almost before I’d begun. I really wanted to like this novel more than I actually did. It started off well, and all the way through there are some things I really liked. But increasingly I found myself struggling to accept what I was being told. I had real difficulty with the gang of teenage serial killers. I just didn’t believe it. There were places where I felt Newitz wasn’t sure in her own mind what she was writing about. We are told repeatedly that the Great Man theory of history doesn’t work: if you kill Hitler, someone else would fill the same niche. Yet everything about Comstock is Great Man theory. And I’m not sure Newitz really noticed how often she was contradicting herself. I loved the time machine, but again I don’t think Newitz had really thought it through. Of course, she gets away with a lot by giving us no details, no explanations, no origin story, but even so I couldn’t make the whole thing hold together in my mind. And then there was the woman from the future. I recall that line, was it from Chandler, that if you are stuck on your plot have someone burst in with a gun. Well Morehshin was that someone with a gun. As far as I can see, her main role, indeed almost her exclusive role, was to let Newitz break all of the rules she had so far established about using the time machine. To my mind this is not playing with the net up. As I say there is a lot about the novel I like. I particularly like Beth and her relationship with her father. And I rather like how Newitz teases us over whether Tess is Beth or Lizzy. But all the way through I couldn’t help feeling that the whole just didn’t hold together.

34: Remains of Elmet – Ted Hughes & Fay Godwin: Another book that has been on our shelves forever and that I never quite got around to reading before. Well, I say reading, but it was Fay Godwin’s startling black and white photographs that caught my attention. Ted Hughes’s poems seemed to me rather flat by comparison, often seeming laboured and repetitious.

35: A Gray Playbook – Alasdair Gray: A beautiful volume, gloriously illustrated by the author. Gray was a moderately successful playwright before he became a novelist, and this gathers together most of his plays ranging from a one-act version of the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus written for and performed by his school classmates when he was about 10, to an incomplete modern adaptation of Goethe’s Faust from 2008. Among the various theatre, radio and television plays between these end points there are the plays that would later be recast as the novels The Fall of Kelvin Walker, Mavis Belfrage, and McGrotty and Ludmilla, along with a host of others I hadn’t encountered in any form before. But for me the two stand-out elements of the book are the script for a putative film version of Poor Things, and an extract from the storyboard for Lanark with which he hoped to persuade someone to make a film of that novel. How much I would give to have seen both those films.

36: The Salzburg Connection – Helen MacInnes: The first of two Helen MacInnes novels I read this year. They are chunky books, well over 300 pages of fairly dense text, and there’s a lot going on in them, yet I get through them at a phenomenal rate. It rarely takes more than a day to read the book from start to finish, I find them so compelling.

37: The One from the Other – Philip Kerr: The first of his Bernie Gunther novels not to be part of the Bernie Gunther Trilogy, even though this follows directly on from the events of A German Requiem, with Gunther getting involved with the ring smuggling Nazis out of Europe to South America.

38: Big Sky – Kate Atkinson: A belated addition to her sequence of Jackson Brodie crime novels. Well, there’s usually a crime, and Brodie sort of investigates though often half-heartedly, and most of the story is told through the eyes of a host of sometimes oddball characters who never know more than a fraction of what is going on. It’s an approach that makes these novels fascinating, though I have to be in the right mood to get the most out of them. I was in the right mood for this.

39: A Kind of Anger – Eric Ambler: It is fascinating to watch Ambler laying down the groundwork that later spy writers would follow. This is a perfect example: a search for someone who doesn’t want to be found, an uneasy alliance between people who aren’t sure they can trust each other, and competing enemy forces that must be outwitted if our central characters are to survive. Great stuff.

40: The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again – M. John Harrison: Okay, I’ve said so for both Strange Horizons and Locus, this is undoubtedly the book of the year. It is simply a distillation of everything that is brilliant about Harrison’s writing, which I’ve written about here (and, tangentially, here).

41: One Two Three Four – Craig Brown: I find it strange that people are still finding different ways to write about the brief decade-long existence of The Beatles, but when the result is as good as this, I can’t complain.

42: The Same River Twice – Ted Mooney which I wrote about here.

43: A Man’s Head – Georges Simenon.

44: Dead Doubles – Trevor Barnes, which I wrote about here.

45: The Lunar Men – Jenny Uglow: And yet again a book that has been sitting neglected on our shelves for too long. This, to me, is both the origin of and the model for the trend for group biographies that we’ve seen since the beginning of this century. It is the story of the group of industrialists and savants from the Midlands that are the very embodiment of the blossoming of scientific knowledge during the latter part of the 18th century. It is a fascinating story and extraordinarily well told.

46: Lost Girls – D.J. Taylor, which I wrote about here.

47: The Evidence – Christopher Priest: To be honest, as I was reading it, this felt like one of his second-rank novels. But I was asked to review it for Foundation, and as I was writing that review I found I was identifying all sorts of connections and resonances that only became clear in retrospect.

48: Bletchley Park and D-Day – David Kenyon: How do you make the story of the codebreakers at Bletchley Park sound uninteresting? By writing it like one of those corporate histories that big companies sometimes insist on putting out. Also, Kenyon seems to have an axe to grind. For him, Enigma has played too big a part in the public perception of Bletchley, so we are constantly being told that they didn’t decipher that much, or the messages they discovered were too late, or they didn’t have that much effect (other things I’ve read suggest this is at best not the whole truth). Meanwhile the other parts of the codebreaking operation are praised unstintingly, as if they are not all part of the same operation. It is, I suspect, significant that Alan Turing hardly appears in the index.

49: The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin – Georges Simenon.

50: The Two-Penny Bar – Georges Simenon.

51: A Diary in the Age of Water – Nina Munteanu: I reviewed this for the BSFA. It seems to me to be a rather clumsily constructed series of mini-lectures about water and the environment presented as being a polemic and the whole thing then disguised as a novel, and every part of that tripartite structure seems to undermine the other two parts.

52: The Shadow Puppet – Georges Simenon.

53: This is How You Lose the Time War – Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, which I wrote about here.

54: Reading Backwards – John Crowley: John Crowley is damned near as fine an essayist and reviewer as he is a novelist, as this selection of pieces from 2005-2018 amply demonstrates. Though reading through did seem to illustrate something I’ve noticed before in American critical writing: while British critics seem to strive to keep themselves out of their reviews, Americans seem to consider reviewing as a branch of autobiography. Thus, here, we learn an awful lot about Crowley’s upbringing, the places he lived, the family’s catholicism, his interest in theatre design and so on. It’s fascinating stuff that is often very revealing about his fiction, particularly the second volume in the Aegypt sequence, Love And Sleep.

55: The Saint-Fiacre Affair – Georges Simenon: I’ve noticed, even in the handful of Maigret novels I’ve now read, how much Simenon likes to ring the changes. In The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin, for instance, Maigret hardly appears for much of the novel. It is like Simenon is constantly looking to find new ways to tell a crime story, while most crime novelists of the inter-war years (Christie, Sayers) told their stories in much the same way, but changed the surrounding detail. That Simenon was consciously rejecting the style of Christie and her kind is demonstrated by this novel, which climaxes with a parodic version of the invariable denouement scene where Poirot gathers all the suspects together. It is a very deliberate two fingers to the then most common style of crime fiction.

56: The Silence – Don DeLillo: It is interesting how much, and how overtly, DeLillo is turning towards science fiction. His last novel, Zero K, concerned cryogenics, this new novella is a version of a disaster story that is very precisely set in the near-future, on Super Bowl Sunday in 2022. While a couple and their younger friend settle down to watch the game, another couple who are expecting to join them are currently on a flight arriving from Paris. Then all the electrics go out: the television is blank, the cell phones are silent, the airplane controls are disabled. We’ve seen this notion of the modern world going away before, and we’ll see it again, but it seems a scenario ideally suited to DeLillo. This is not a catastrophe of rioting and bloodshed and people reverting to savagery, that’s not how DeLillo characters react to anything; rather this is a catastrophe of isolation and silence. Conversations stop being responses, one person to another, and become overlapping monologues with no interconnection. One character loses touch with reality as he begins to imagine the game he is not seeing on the screen. For DeLillo, when the modern world goes away it takes away our connections to other people.

57: Pray for a Brave Heart – Helen MacInnes: In The Salzburg Connection an American amateur finds himself caught up in a plot involving Nazis and Russians centred on a picturesque Alpine village just outside Salzburg; in Pray for a Brave Heart an American amateur finds himself caught up in a plot involving Nazis and Russians centred on a picturesque Alpine village just outside Bern. They are not the same stories, but there is a Helen MacInnes pattern that is starkly illustrated by reading these two novels in close proximity. Doesn’t stop me enjoying them, though.

58: Snow – John Banville: I don’t understand why this novel has not been published under Banville’s Benjamin Black persona, it is so very clearly a Benjamin Black novel, even to numerous references to Quirke and Hackett from the early Black novels. And the setting is is the same as in the Quirke novels: Ireland in the 1950s, with the focus on the baleful political and social influence of the all-powerful Catholic church. In this instance, as a corner of South East Ireland lies under a thick blanket of snow in the last few days before Christmas, a priest is stabbed to death and then castrated. The policeman sent down from Dublin is a protestant so the way the Catholic hierarchy tries to cover up the details of the case and interfere with the investigation are particularly galling. It is a familiar scenario from Banville/Black, I worked out the who and the why of the murder quite early on, but it is very well done.

59: X Y & Z – Dermot Turing: Turing, the nephew of Alan Turing, set out to write the story of how Enigma was broken, but he quickly became focussed on the story of the Polish codebreakers who first cracked the German codes. The Enigma machine was patented towards the end of the First World War and initially sold as a commercial device, but the German military started to take it up at the end of the 1920s. For Poland, effectively divided between German and Russian rule by the Versailles treaty, this was a problem, and the Polish independent movement started to gather together a crack team of mathematicians and codebreakers in order to get access to German secrets. And they succeeded; Polish codebreakers were regularly reading German Enigma messages at least ten years before Alan Turing started working on the problem. The Poles had even invented a device they called a “Bombe” which helped work out the setting for the three rotors in the Enigma machine. The Polish Bombe was the basis for the machine of the same name that Turing would later develop. Meanwhile, a senior and rather dubious character in French intelligence, Gustave Bertrand, had a German double agent who was regularly selling them top flight information, including codebooks and Enigma settings. But the French had no facilities for codebreaking, so they got together with the Poles to swap information. Meanwhile, still unaware that Enigma had been cracked, the German military started to improve security, adding additional rotors to the machine, and changing settings on a daily basis. This made the Polish Bombe ineffective, so the arrangement with France was expanded to include Britain for extra facilities. This was the X (France), Y (Britain) & Z (Poland) intelligence alliance that was established bare months before Germany invaded Poland. The Polish codebreakers escaped at the last moment, but rather than getting them to Britain where their work would have given the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park an astonishing head start, Bertrand set them up in Vichy France where their facilities were fewer and the risks were greater. They still did some significant work there, until Germany took over Vichy and they had to flee again. Some got away, many didn’t. Those who evaded capture by the Abwehr made it to Britain but their position was now ambiguous and they were set up in a separate establishment away from Bletchley Park. Typically, once the war was over Britain was unwelcoming, and the contribution of the Polish codebreakers to the war effort was almost completely overlooked until recently. This is a fascinating book, and a wonderful corrective to Kenyon’s sour view.

And that’s it, not quite 60 books in one year. Years ago, when I was fresh out of university and first started keeping a note of the books I finished each year, I was averaging well over 100 every year. When I revived the practice a few years ago through this blog, I usually managed to read somewhere around 70 books each year. 59 is the lowest annual total I can ever remember.

Of course there were distractions. For the first half of the year I was writing the book on Aldiss, which was not, I confess, a very easy job. And later in the year there were proof corrections and other bits and pieces to do with The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest, which came out in November (did I mention I have a new book?). For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, I’ve written about it here and here. And of course there were reviews for Foundation and Science Fiction Studies and the BSFA, though nowhere near as many as in some other years. But these writing assignments wouldn’t really have taken any more time away from reading than similar assignments have done in other years. No, it was a year in which events made it hard to give myself over to reading.

Of course the year is ending now, within a few hours as I write this 2020 will be over and done with. There are vaccines for the coronavirus, Trump has been voted out, a Brexit deal has been done at the last minute (a ridiculously bad deal, but better than no deal, I suppose); so 2021 has to be better. Right? Well, I’ll withhold judgement on that. Let’s say I’m not feeling overly optimistic. In Britain the government has shown an unprecedented ability to screw up everything it touches, so let’s just say that I’m not totally convinced that the various stresses and horrors of the pandemic or of Brexit are actually safely behind us. I suppose all we can do is hope and wait and see.

Good luck out there!

A year in review

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books of the year

Okay, it’s that time of the year again, when I go through everything I’ve read. Which turns out to be more than I’d anticipated, given that the first third of the year was given over to writing my book on Christopher Priest (The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest, due out from Gylphi in March 2020), and the rest of the year was given over to researching my book on Brian Aldiss (due for delivery to Illinois University Press in March, but in all probability it will be sometime during the summer).

There were, indeed, a couple of times during the latter part of the year when Aldiss became a roadblock for me, and I found myself for weeks at a time unable to read anything else, and barely able to bring myself to pick up whichever Aldiss title  was then working my way through. And there were extraneous stresses as well, which didn’t help. I have found myself almost frozen into immobility by Brexit, a madness from which there seems to be no escape. I’ve described this, elsewhere, as a nation collectively and eagerly committing suicide. Certainly what has been revealed about the national character by this whole charade has left me feeling that this is not my country, that I don’t belong here and I don’t want to belong here.

But enough of that! Let us turn our attention to books. I read over 70 books this year, just about the same number as I read last year, though it really does feel like more than I’ve managed for several years. And as is usually the case, the titles in bold are those I rate as the best of the year.

1: After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry – her first novel, which I wrote about on this blog.

2: The Doll’s Alphabet by Camilla Grudova – a collection of extraordinary stories that I reviewed at Strange Horizons.

3: The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley – a rather wonderful short novel.

4: Melmoth by Sarah Perry – her latest novel, which I wrote about here.

5: What Not by Rose MacAulay – one of two novels I read this year that started to fill in the curious gap in British science fiction in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. I reviewed this for Strange Horizons.

6: A Spy in Time by Imraan Coovadia – it does some interesting things with very familiar time travel elements; an enjoyable read but not a spectacularly great novel.

7: The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts – I don’t normally like Watts, at least not as much as many others seem to, but this short novel did work for me.

8: Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice – set on a reservation in northern Canada where they are used to being without modern amenities, so they hardly notice when power goes down, mobile phone signals are lost and the internet disappears. It’s not a problem until white refugees start to appear. It’s a wonderful slow apocalypse, though the ending is rather too rushed for the novel’s good.

9: Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller – this was the novel we gave the Campbell Memorial Award to this year, and I think it is thoroughly deserved. An excellent novel.

10: Theory of Bastards by Audrey Schulman – another slow apocalypse, this time centred on a tribe of bonobos at a remote zoo and their human keepers, and the cross-species collaboration that allows their survival.

11: Time Was by Ian McDonald – a lovely short novel, but it felt that it should have been longer and a little more developed.

12: Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar – an alternate history novel with postmodern overtones, and though both aspects were well done I couldn’t help feeling that we’ve been there before.

13: The Rise and Fall of the British Nation by David Edgerton – not a book I want to try to sum up in a couple of sentences, but it is a revelatory account of twentieth century British history. For instance, those Brexiteers who see a return to Empire as our national salvation might care to consider the fact that when Empire was at its height during the first half of the century we had more trade with Argentina than with the Empire.

14: Big Cat and Other Stories by Gwyneth Jones – always great to see a new book from Gwyneth, but though some of the stories were excellent I was really disappointed with the title story. I reviewed the book for Strange Horizons.

15: Bury My Heart at W.H. Smith’s by Brian Aldiss – the slog begins; and I’m not going to say anything about these books here, mostly because I’m still processing.

16: The Brightfount Diaries by Brian Aldiss.

17: Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss.

18: Little by Edward Carey – a novel about Madame Tussaud in her youth that I wrote about here.

19: Space, Time and Nathaniel by Brian Aldiss.

20: Hothouse by Brian Aldiss.

21: Earthworks by Brian Aldiss.

22: Barefoot in the Head by Brian Aldiss.

23: Greybeard by Brian Aldiss.

24: Frankenstein Unbound by Brian Aldiss.

25: The Eighty-Minute Hour by Brian Aldiss.

26: Moreau’s Other Island by Brian Aldiss.

27: Mooncranker’s Gift by Barry Unsworth – an early novel by a writer I came to value highly, though not for this novel. I wrote about it here.

28: Snare of the Hunter by Helen MacInnes – which I wrote about here.

29: The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey – a clever book, told backwards and with the chapters mirroring each other, but the interesting thing is that the story survives the cleverness. Though I suspect it is a book you really need to read in as close to a single sitting as you can.

30: Uncommon Danger by Eric Ambler – which I wrote about here.

31: The Great Level by Stella Tillyard – a fairly straightforward historical novel that takes us from the draining of the fens to the early days of New Amsterdam. A good but not spectacular novel.

32: Epitaph for a Spy by Eric Ambler – not much to add to what I’ve said elsewhere about Ambler.

33: Quinn’s Book by William Kennedy – a while ago I got onto something of a jag with William Kennedy, picking up everything by him I could lay my hands on. Then, for some reason I stopped reading him. Then over the summer I picked up this novel and reminded myself all over again what a damned good writer he is.

34: The Green Hollow by Owen Sheers – a play about Aberfan that I wrote about here.

35: March Violets by Philip Kerr – the first of the Bernie Gunther novels I’ve read; there will be more.

36: HHhH by Laurent Binet – I was playing around with the idea of writing something for this blog about Nazis in fiction, picking up on this and the Philip Kerr and Eric Ambler. Somehow nothing came of it, but these are all fascinating books.

37: The Primal Urge by Brian Aldiss.

38: The Dark Light Years by Brian Aldiss.

39: Cryptozoic by Brian Aldiss.

40: Report on Probability A by Brian Aldiss.

41: Washington Black by Esi Edugyan – which I wrote about here.

42: Cracken at Critical by Brian Aldiss.

43: Galaxies Like Grains of Sand by Brian Aldiss.

44: Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss – which I wrote about here.

45: Starswarm by Brian Aldiss.

46: Churchill’s Wizards by Nicholas Rankin – for some reason an interest in wartime deception re-emerged at around this time, and this was the first fruit which I wrote about here.

47: The Malacia Tapestry by Brian Aldiss.

48: The Cambridge History of Science Fiction edited by Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link – which I reviewed for Extrapolation.

49: Operation Fortitude by Joshua Levine – more on wartime deception, covered here.

50: The War Magician by David Fisher – the story of Jasper Maskelyne that is itself deceptive and far from what actually happened, also covered here.

51: The Half-God of Rainfall by Inua Ellams – an epic poem that links Nigerian mythology, Greek mythology and basketball, and somehow it works.

52: Hide My Eyes by Margery Allingham – which I wrote about here.

53: Helliconia Spring by Brian Aldiss.

54: Memento Mori by Muriel Spark – is this the wickedest, sharpest, most bitterly funny of her novels. Well it’s certainly a contender for that title.

55: Horizon by Helen MacInnes – more espionage.

56: Helliconia Summer by Brian Aldiss.

57: The Question Mark by Muriel Jaeger – an unexpected companion to Rose MacAulay’s novel, an early dystopia from the 1920s that I reviewed for Strange Horizons.

58: Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre – another addition to my wartime deception library. This is probably as close as we will get to a definitive account of “The Man Who Never Was”. What strikes me in this and in the other books on this subject that I’ve read is how incompetent German intelligence was, and how lucky British intelligence was.

59: Of Me and Others by Alasdair Gray – the year ended with the terrible news of Gray’s death. This was the first of two of his books I read this year, with the expectation that there would be more to follow. And yet there is a strange sense of tidying things up and closing down in this collection, which brings together a variety of essays, including a number I’ve read before in other books.

60: Helliconia Winter by Brian Aldiss.

61: The Dark Frontier by Eric Ambler -which I wrote about here.

62: A Romance of the Equator by Brian Aldiss.

63: Best SF Stories of Brian W. Aldiss by Brian Aldiss.

64: Dracula Unbound by Brian Aldiss.

65: White Mars by Brian Aldiss and Roger Penrose – which inspired some thoughts here.

66: The Twinkling of an Eye by Brian Aldiss.

67: Ivory Apples by Lisa Goldstein – a straightforward fantasy that is also a subversive account of the creative processes that I reviewed for Strange Horizons.

68: Sideways in Time: Critical Essays on Alternate History Fiction edited by Glyn Morgan and C. Palmer-Patel – a variable collection, some of which I have strong arguments with, and which I am reviewing for the BSFA.

69: The Dollmaker by Nina Allan – in my round-up of the year for Locus I described it as a nexus that recalled aspects of Little by Edward Carey, The Doll’s Alphabet by Camilla Grudova, and After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry. I alsosaid that it is impossible to say whether or not we are meant to take it as a work of straightforward realist fiction. Anything overtly weird or fantastic is restricted to the interpolated stories, which are crowded with echoes and repetitions and a sense of otherness. Yet what makes this novel is the way that these stories, supposedly written decades before, prefigure characters, incidents and situations in the present. Which leaves The Dollmaker with an overwhelming sense of the uncanny, even though nothing exactly strange happens.

70: Purgatory by Alasdair Gray – what is perhaps most sad about the death of Alasdair Gray is that it probably means we won’t get the final part of his translation of The Divine Comedy.

71: Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare by Giles Milton – the story of the oddballs who were behind Britain’s sabotage efforts during the Second World War, and how consistently the more conventional military forces and government departments tried to hamper them.

72: Friends and Lovers by Helen MacInnes – her spy novels tend to involve competent young men with a background in the arts or journalism, or both, who prove skilled at adapting to any unexpected situation, and who teams up with a young woman who turns out to be equally adaptable and imaginative. Take out the spy story, and what you have is a straightforward love story; which is exactly what this novel turns out to be. It is also the first of her novels that I’ve encountered that is set before the time in which it was written (first published 1948, but set around 1932-3), which leads me to wonder whether it was an early work which was dusted off when she started to be successful.

73: Morning Glory on the Vine by Joni Mitchell – another book displaced in time. Although first published in 2019, it actually consists of a selection of her pictures, lyrics and poems that she gathered together as a Christmas present for friends in the early-1970s. It is interesting to see how the lyrics of songs differ from what was recorded, and how some of the song lyrics are lifted from earlier poems.

As for my writing, it doesn’t seem like much: five reviews for Strange Horizons, one for Extrapolation, and the usual end-of-year bits and pieces, maybe 15,000 words in total. But then, I did manage to fit in an 80-odd thousand word book on Chris Priest, so it probably wasn’t too bad. And that was 2019, heaven knows what 2020 will bring, but I have a strange feeling it will end up being every bit as stressful as the last couple of years have been.

2018: A Year in Books

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books of the year

It has been a stressful year. Stressful on a national level – watching your own government wilfully commit national suicide with Brexit is something that gets to you in a surprisingly visceral way; and stressful on a personal level – we had builders in to completely remake the kitchen, and though they were wonderfully considerate and did a brilliant job it still meant four months of being constantly on call, constantly aware of other people in the house, constantly living in a building site. Stressful, also, in that the book I’m currently writing on Christopher Priest is proving much more complex than anticipated, so I’m well behind schedule on it. So by Christmas I was exhausted, and looking back it was hard to think if anything good had actually happened during the year.

But of course it had. For a start, my monograph on Iain M. Banks won the BSFA Award, and was shortlisted for the Hugo and Locus Awards. And I signed a contract for a new book on Brian Aldiss, which I will be starting the moment that the Priest book is out of the way. And while the Priest book is proving more recalcitrant than I expected (or at least hoped), it is also proving very satisfying.

And somehow, in the middle of all that, I still managed to read more books than has been my norm of late. As is always the case when I list my reading at the end of each year, I’m only including those books I read carefully all the way through. Those I skimmed or dipped into or started and could not finish, for award reading or research or what have you, don’t make it onto the list. The titles in bold are those that particularly stood out for me, though I haven’t put any of the Priest titles in bold because, well, that would be redundant, wouldn’t it.

Anyway, this is my reading from 2018:

1: Assignment in Brittany by Helen MacInnes, which I wrote about here.

2: Indoctrinaire by Christopher Priest – the research begins …

3: Journey into Fear by Eric Ambler, which I wrote about here.

4: Fugue for a Darkening Island by Christopher Priest

5: Heartstone by C.J. Sansom, another of the excellent Shardlake novels.

6: The Space Machine by Christopher Priest

7: The Dreams of Bethany Melmoth by William Boyd; I wrote here about why I tend to find Boyd’s short stories so disappointing.

8: Loose Canon by Ian Shircore; not a particularly good book, but it’s about the ever-wonderful songwriting partnership of Pete Atkin and Clive James, and I wrote about it here.

9: The Wrong Stars by Tim Pratt: a rather old-fashioned action-adventure story that still rather caught my attention. There are some nice little touches, the casual way it deals with issues of gender and what is normal, the aliens who are liars and tell no consistent story about anything, the “goldilocks” ship that suddenly turns up 500 years later on the edge of the solar system and with only one crew member in place. But too much else is formulaic for the book to really work as well as it should have done.

10: The Stargazer’s Embassy by Eleanor Lerman, which I reviewed at Strange Horizons.

11: Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich: I was enchanted by the novel. It really is beautifully written and vivid in the way it describes pregnancy being made progressively more horrible by means of government interference. A satire on the Republican interference on the (literal) female body politic, of course, but then an awful lot of the best sf is satire.

12: The Genius Plague by David Walton. This was the novel that won the Campbell Award this year. It wasn’t my top choice, though it did make my shortlist. I found it a slick, smooth thriller that goes down easily. The characters are attractive, the writing is unexceptional, the story is well-paced. The central conceit, about an Amazonian fungi forming a symbiotic relationship with the human brain, is maybe not totally convincing, but it provides for a vivid enough story. Though I must confess that I found the bits about the workings of the NSA more interesting than the science fictional bits.

13: Luna: Wolf Moon by Ian McDonald. A much better novel than its predecessor, but for me it’s still not McDonald at his absolute best.

14: Tropic of Kansas by Christopher Brown. It is a wonderfully detailed portrait of America in the grip of a dictatorship. Indeed, in some ways it feels like a companion piece to the Louise Erdrich. And yes, we’ve seen this sort of near-future political sf many times before, but it is written with a freshness and an attention to detail that I find both refreshing and convincing. The downside is that it is probably 100 pages longer than it needs to be, as if he is trying to put too much into the novel. And the central character, Sig, does seem to have an ability to get out of the tightest situation with the greatest of ease, which isn’t always convincing. But the sorts of situations he finds himself in, and in particular the way that there are not two sides but many sides in the conflict, and the different alliances are often uneasy and unwelcome, is something that I do find convincing.

15: The Smoke by Simon Ings. I didn’t think this was quite as good as Wolves, which is a pity. I reviewed it for Vector.

16: Grant by Ron Chernow: a massive biography that I wrote about here.

17: Science Fiction Rebels by Mike Ashley. The latest in his seemingly interminable and unfailingly pedestrian history of science fiction magazines, which I reviewed for Science Fiction Studies.

18: Inverted World by Christopher Priest: back to the research …

19: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders. I came late to this, but boy is it good!

20: An Infinite Summer by Christopher Priest

21: A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark. I continue my efforts to read at least one of Spark’s novels every year, and I wrote about this one here.

22: A Dream of Wessex by Christopher Priest

23: The Glamour by Christopher Priest

24: Shelter by Dave Hutchinson, which I reviewed for Locus.

25: Ghika Craxton Leigh Fermor edited by Evita Arapoglou. A catalogue to accompany a most wonderful exhibition of paintings by Nikos Ghika and John Craxton, along with bits and pieces by the inevitable Patrick Leigh Fermor. Craxton’s work in particular, most of which I’d never seen before, absolutely blew me away. I wrote about the exhibition here, and this is a model of how a good catalogue should be, detailed, informative and discursive.

26: The Quiet Woman by Christopher Priest

27: Cargo of Eagles by Margery Allingham, which I wrote about here.

28: The Prestige by Christopher Priest

29: The Mind Readers by Margery Allingham

30: The Beckoning Lady by Margery Allingham. More of her satisfying crime stories set in her fascinatingly contained little world.

31: The Extremes by Christopher Priest

32: The Book on the Edge of Forever by Christopher Priest

33: The Photographs of Joan Leigh Fermor edited by Ian Collins and Olivia Stewart, which I wrote about here.

34: Victorious Century by David Cannadine, which I wrote about here.

35: “IT” Came from Outer Space by Christopher Priest

36: Why Do Birds Suddenly Disappear? By Lev Parikian. Maureen pressed this book on me, and I’m glad she did. A funny, self-deprecating, revealing and at times moving account of a year spent bird watching, if only all nature writing could be this engaging.

37: Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. Much as I like Kate Atkinson’s writing, I’d never tried any of her Jackson Brodie novels. I think I was put off by catching a bit of one of the TV adaptations once, and not liking it. But on the page, this one at least if every bit as good, and as convoluted, as you’d expect.

38: The Separation by Christopher Priest

39: Haven by Adam Roberts, a companion to Hutchinson’s Shelter, which I reviewed for Locus.

40: The Real-Town Murders by Adam Roberts, a better book, though I always think Roberts is at his very best when he lets his literary interests take flight (see later).

41: North From Rome by Helen MacInnes. One of her twisted little spy thrillers is perfect holiday reading.

42: Lamentation by C.J. Sansom, the last Shardlake until I can get hold of the one that has just been published; such good historical writing.

43: Austral by Paul McAuley. Better than his last couple of novels, but I still didn’t enjoy it as much as most people seem to have done, mostly because I found the back story far far more interesting than the plot being played out in the foreground.

44: The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan. Another book I seem to have caught up with long after everyone else. The story of a peculiar home for children told in a crude and vivacious demotic, the sort of book you feel you need to read aloud just to capture the flavour of the words.

45: Unicorns, Almost by Owen Sheers. I love the work of the Welsh poet, novelist and playwright, and I wrote about this one-man play here.

46: White Tears by Hari Kunzru. All the time I was reading this I kept thinking that I’ve encountered the basic plot somewhere before: a couple of young white kids manufacture a blues record from something they taped in the street, ascribe it to a made-up name then find that name and their fictional recording are actually real. I still don’t know if I have met it before, and if so, where, but it nagged away. Meanwhile the white kids venturing into the segregated south is great stuff.

47: An American Story by Christopher Priest, which I reviewed for Locus.

48: Europe at Dawn by Dave Hutchinson. Is there anyone writing more politically relevant science fiction in Britain at the moment? I reviewed this for Locus.

49: Ravilious & Co: The Pattern of Friendship by Andy Friend, which I wrote about here, and I do wish there was an exhibition to accompany the book.

50: Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History by Joseph North, which I complained about here.

51: The Dream Archipelago by Christopher Priest

52: Christopher Priest by Nicholas Ruddick, more research.

53: Electric Eden by Rob Young, which I wrote about here.

54: The Affirmation by Christopher Priest

55: Holy Disorders by Edmund Crispin, I don’t think any of Crispin’s delicious little crime stories ever bear any connection with real life, but they always feel as if they should.

56: The Islanders by Christopher Priest

57: The Adjacent by Christopher Priest

58: Transcription by Kate Atkinson, which I wrote about here.

59: eXistenZ by John Luther Novak, more Priestly research.

60: The Gradual by Cristopher Priest

61: Prelude to Terror by Helen MacInnes, one of her later novels, that I’d not previously encountered.

62: The Written World by Martin Puchner. I’d meant to write about this here, but didn’t because I was so dissatisfied. It should be an interesting book, studies in the way that changes in writing and print technology and so forth have led to real-world changes. And there are, indeed, fascinating chapters on, for instance, “Ezra and the Creation of Holy Scripture” and on “Gutenberg, Luther, and the New Public of Print”. But other chapters have a flaccid journalistic style, he intrudes personally into too many of the stories (why does he need to go travelling around Sicily in order to write about Goethe?), and the chapter on Derek Walcott is embarrassingly self-indulgent.

63: Episodes by Christopher Priest. Priest let me see the manuscript of this forthcoming short story collection due, I suspect, sometime late in 2019.

64: Love is Blind by William Boyd. This is the sort of thing that Boyd does best, a story of a consumptive piano tuner at the start of the 20th century that takes us from Edinburgh to Paris to Russia and the Pacific. Confident storytelling, vivid characterization, and a remarkably solid sense of place, what more could you want.

65: The Black Prince by Adam Roberts. This is, by far and without doubt, the best book of the year. An unconventional and yet somehow true picture of the middle ages, a prismatic narrative structure stolen wholesale from John Dos Passos, a restless shifting between the real and the fantastic. This is the sort of literary pizzazz that shows Roberts at his absolute best!

66: Cloak of Darkness by Helen MacInnes, another of her late novels.

67: Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee. Reviewed for Science Fiction Studies. Everyone seems to be adoring this book because of the way it takes us back to the Golden Age of SF; what nobody seems to take on board is that it is all about how the so-called Golden Age was built on lies, and led by a bunch of deeply unpleasant men. It’s a great book, but it’s not what so many people seem to think they are reading.

68: Tell them of Battles, Kings and Elephants by Mathias Enard. An exquisite little alternate history in which Michelangelo visits Constantinople during one of his periodic spats with the Pope, and is commissioned by the Sultan to design a bridge to cross the Golden Horn. The clash of cultures, in particular Michelangelo’s growing fascination with a sexually ambiguous singer while failing to notice that the poet who is his companion is falling in love with him, is all handled with wonderful delicacy.

69: The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler. How did it take me so long to discover Ambler? This is just about perfect as a tight little meditation on the crime story and real crime.

70: Arkady by Patrick Langley, which I’ll be reviewing for Strange Horizons.

71: Hell by Alasdair Gray. The first part of his “Englishing” of Dante’s Divine Comedy; typically robust, crude and engaging.

72: Murmur by Will Eaves. This is based on the final days of Alan Turing, but there are significant differences between Turing and the novel’s hero. The whole thing shifts constantly in a dreamlike way, so that the story recalls the protagonist’s schooldays or career or private life without ever distinguishing between what is real, what is misremembered, and what is pure dream. There is a spellbinding moment in which a visit to see his mother and brother turns imperceptibly into a variation on Snow White that is a masterclass in how to handle such ambiguous storytelling.

73: Science Fiction: A Literary History edited by Roger Luckhurst. The chapters by Arthur Evans on early science fiction and by Sheryl Vint on sf between the New Wave and the new century are particularly good. Others tend to vary in quality, one or two had me arguing vehemently with them.

2017 in Review

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Anthony Gottlieb, Arthur C Clarke, Becky Chambers, Benjamin Black, books of the year, Bruce Sterling, C.J. Sansom, China Mieville, Christopher Priest, Colin Greenland, Dave Hutchinson, Edmund Crispin, Emma Chambers, Emma Newman, Gerry Canavan, Gwyneth Jones, Helen MacInnes, Iain Banks, Iain R. MacLeod, Joanna Kavenna, John Banville, John Crowley, John Kessel, John Le Carre, Judith A. Barter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Laurent Binet, Laurie Penny, Lavie Tidhar, Lily Brooks-Dalton, m john harrison, Margery Allingham, Mark Fisher, Matt Ruff, Michael Chabon, nina allan, Octavia Butler, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Paul Auster, Paul Nash, Rick Wilber, Rob Latham, Steve Erickson, Stuart Jeffries, Tade Thompson, Tricia Sullivan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Yoon Ha Lee

It’s that time of year again, when I dust off this oft-forgotten blog and post a list of my reading through the year, along with other odd comments.

2017 has been, in some respects, a very good year. My first full-length book not composed of previously published material, appeared in May. Iain M. Banks appeared in the series Modern Masters of Science Fiction from Illinois University Press, and has received some generally positive reviews, much to my relief.

Also this year I signed a contract with Gylphi to write a book about Christopher Priest, which is likely to take most if not all of the next year. In addition, I’ve put in a proposal for another volume in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction; the initial response has been quite good so I’m hoping I’ll have more to report in the new year. So, in work terms, it looks like the next couple of years are pretty much taken care of.

Out of Silence: 2016 in Books

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books of the year

Okay, 2016 was a bad year, in many more ways than I would care to enumerate. But on a personal level, it was a year in which silence seemed to fall, as if I became both deaf and mute. Not literally, I hasten to add, but metaphorically: I seemed to lose the ability to read and to write.

2015, a year in review

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books of the year

Well, that was a strange year. We are currently living in what used to be called genteel poverty, which means we’ve got just about enough money to live on but not much more than that. So we’ve not been seen around as much as we might like, and we’ve missed out on a lot of things that everyone else takes for granted but that have suddenly become luxuries. Hopefully, things will get better, but probably not for a couple of years. Meanwhile, we keep reading and writing, and every so often someone might notice what we do though more often than not they don’t.

Primarily, for me, this has been the year of Iain Banks. Which means that most of my reading has been research for the book; that is, re-reading all of his science fiction, dipping into a number of others, spending a lot of time reading interviews and essays and reviews and other stuff. Making notes, and then writing the notes up. The first draft of the book is done, revisions will follow any day now, and with luck the whole thing will be going off to the publisher around the end of January.

All of which has meant that I haven’t written as much as usual (I deliberately cut back on the number of reviews I write), though I still managed to produce well over 50,000 words of reviews and columns and essays, in addition to the book.

It has also meant that I haven’t finished as many books as usual, since my reading has been otherwise directed. 50 books in a year is the lowest total I’ve achieved for a very long time, probably for a matter of decades. Still, here’s the usual list, and as ever those I particularly rate are in bold.

2014 in review

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books of the year

In terms of writing, this was a good year; in terms of reading, not so good.

As far as fiction is concerned, this was the best year I’ve had for some time. I wrote two stories, and sold both of them. “Edenbridge” has already appeared in Fantastic Stories Presents: Fantasy Super Pack #1, edited by Warren Lapine; “Documents in the Case of Brother G” is due to be published next year.

I also did something I don’t intend to make a habit of doing, which is put up a story here on the blog: “The Lost Domain”. It’s nice to see a few people have read it.

2013 Reading

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books of the year

A strange year. I was made redundant at the beginning of January, which relieved me of the need to spend five hours a day commuting and spend too damned many hours sitting in an office; and yet it had the perverse effect of giving me less time to read. Ah well, these are the 66 books I did read. As ever, the ones I rate particularly highly are in bold:

2012 Reading

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books of the year

This last year I deliberately cut back on the amount of reviewing I was doing, because 2011 was just mad. The reduction in reviewing also seems to have had the knock-on effect of cutting down the amount I read. Just over 70 books this year, which was a comfortable amount. As ever, I have put in bold the ones I really rate.