2006: The Best of the Books
Past years’ best-of lists show my reading pendulum swinging from non-fiction to fiction and back again. This year was squarely at the non-fiction end, with most of it in academic journal form, but I did manage to read a reasonable bunch of books for enjoyment—although most of those have also been non-fiction. Just yesterday, for example, I finished Joanna Blythman’s Shopped: The Shocking Power of British Supermarkets, a companion piece to Felicity Lawrence’s Not on the Label that reminded me just how grim the UK’s retail landscape has become. This year I’ve also caught up on Levitt & Dubner’s Freakonomics and Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, two books that bloggers have gone on about ad nauseam, possibly because their short stand-alone chapters with no particular theme suit bloggers’ fractured attention spans. None of them made the list, though. Here’s what has.
10. Sue Townsend, Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004)
I was a bit slow getting around to this, but it’s not as if the WMDs of the title have left the news. Adrian is the same frustrating loser we’ve known throughout the adult years of the series, with the same moments of decency; in this instalment, he gets into crippling debt and is dragged into engagement against his will. It’s a more satisfying read than the uncollected Guardian columns, but I half wish Townsend had retired him after the unbeatable ending of The Cappuccino Years. This instalment does offer a sense of romantic closure that we rarely get from a Mole diary, though. Other fiction I enjoyed this year included Bernard Schlink’s The Reader (late to the party again), Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (but not as much as Anansi Boys), Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai (but not as much as some people did), and Ian McEwan’s creepy short stories in In Between the Sheets.
9. Tim Moore, Nul Points
The latest outing for possibly my favourite travel writer. Moore’s gimmick of visiting every Eurovision loser to score the wooden spoon is more contrived than some of his past works, but it still works. The losers range from tortured souls whose lives were ruined by their Euro-shame to accomplished musicians who have enjoyed amazingly successful careers in their homelands post-nul. One is even the lead singer of an indie band you may well have heard of (but I won’t spoil the surprise). Propelled by Moore’s witty enthusiasm for the Eurovision phenomenon and the build-up to his meeting with Jemini, the 2003 entry for the U.K., Nul Points is a fun read for any fan of humorous travel writing, music, and grand European projects gone awry.
8. Will Bishop-Stephens, It’s Wrongboy’s History of Earth (2004)
When I read this slim volume it felt like an instant classic for kids of all ages. It certainly stands up well against another classic I discovered this year, Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters, and a classic-in-the-making, Neil Gaiman’s delightfully dark Coraline. While I’m mentioning books for, by, or about children, two excellent graphic novels-cum-memoirs also deserve mention: David B.’s Epileptic and Craig Thompson’s Blankets.
7. C.H. Prodgers, Adventures in Bolivia (1922)
A book I picked up for a pound in Shelter a month ago and ended up reading aloud to Jane every night, which is great fun with an old yarn like this. Prodgers was an English businessman and adventurer in search of rubber concessions and lost mines, with an eye for odd but often mundane detail that makes this at turns unintentionally hilarious and fleetingly beautiful. Servants called Manuel get stricken with fever at disturbingly regular intervals, jaguars stalk the jungle, temperatures in the mountains span a hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the space of six hours, and Prodgers shoots a lot of bush turkeys. All I’ve been able to find out about old Cecil Herbert is here (which tells me that unfortunately I have an unillustrated edition). Now I want to find his Adventures in Peru for a pound as well. (As this is now out of copyright, I’ve even toyed with the idea of doing something more with it. Too many projects...)
6. Geoff Dyer, Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It (2004)
5. The Poems of Ted Hughes
While visiting friends in Nottingham for a poetry-related project of my own, I had a look through their copy of Ted Hughes’s Selected Poems 1957–1981 and was immediately taken by his visceral, taut lines, their dark sense of humour and their earthy Englishness. Here in a few words were all the rain and fog of the deserted British countryside that I’ve been getting to know so well. Back in Edinburgh I kept an eye out for a second-hand copy, then settled on a 2004 selection by Simon Armitage, which at four pounds RRP is excellent value. It contains all the poems that caught my imagination—The Horses, Theology, Heptonstall, Examination at the Womb-Door, Do not Pick up the Telephone—and many more, without being as daunting as the 1300-page Collected Poems. I suppose at some point I’ll read more about the man beyond a basic pop-cultural awareness of Ted Hughes the Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes the husband of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes did he or didn’t he drive her to suicide, but at the moment I’m taking my time with nothing but the work—because the work is amazing.
4. Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997)
De Botton cops flak from some academics for his popularisations of little-read works of philosophy and literature, but not having read all those works myself it’s hard to tell how much of it is academic nitpicking, how much is jealousy, and how much is well-founded; he seems to be the humanities equivalent of the popular science writers working scientists love to dis. Perhaps his TV appearances have fuelled the backlash. I haven’t seen them; and the only books of his that I’ve read are The Consolations of Philosophy, which I enjoyed, and this, which I enjoyed even more. De Botton has transformed Proust’s gargantuan masterpiece from something I’ll never read into something I now want to tackle someday, which surely even the most persnickety Proustian scholar would consider a good thing. Unless they like being the only people who’ve read him.
3. Charlie Brooker, Screen Burn (2004)
2. Bill Bryson, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
Bill Bryson had been slipping down my list of Best Humorous Travel Writers, having written some less-than-first-rate books (the throwaway African Diary) and being up against stiff competition. But The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is a return to form if ever there was. It’s the flipside of his early travelogue Lost Continent: where that was full of reminiscences of childhood trips around the Midwest, this is his reminiscences of childhood at home in Des Moines. Bryson’s was an ordinary enough childhood, apart from the occasional neighbourhood explosion, but he’s turned it into his best book in years: nostalgic, informative as ever, and sometimes gaspingly funny.
1. David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (2001)
Yes, it’s a self-help book. No, I’m not claiming it’s great literature. But this did exactly what it promised: helped me get things done—things I wanted to get done but wasn’t confident I would. Some of its methods have stuck; others have slipped enough that it feels about time for a refresher course. But they worked well enough to see me through a year that could otherwise have been an almighty mess, which makes this the book that had the biggest effect on me in 2006. If your own To Do lists are growing out of control, give it a look—maybe you’ll find it as helpful as I did.
Passing Mention: Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered America (2003)
This book drove me crazy. Intrigued by the premise, and remembering some claims floating about years ago of Chinese relics found in New Zealand, I picked up a second-hand copy and gave it a go. It started interestingly enough, with a description of fifteenth-century China at the height of its powers, and some of his early supposition about how a voyage of “treasure ships” could have travelled further than was commonly accepted seemed plausible. But enough alarm bells started ringing that I began to hunt around for second opinions, which soon had me on my guard. Curiosity kept me reading, though, as his accumulated evidence grew weaker, and weaker; Menzies piled supposition on supposition, using previous suppositions as evidence for later ones. In the end, it was obvious I’d read a big fat hardback of historical fiction that wasn’t as well-written as other big fat hardbacks of historical fiction I’d been putting off finishing. The only real value in reading the whole thing was that it made reading the comprehensive debunkings more enjoyable. At least my money went to Shelter and not the publisher who advanced him half a million quid for it.