So Many Books
As if my procrastination on music reviewing wasn’t bad enough, it’s over four years since I wrote anything much about books here. I always told myself it was because I wasn’t reading much after our son arrived, or because I’ve been reading mostly for work, but actually I’ve managed to complete a fair few once they’re all added up. So instead of a top ten for 2010, here’s a top ten for 2007-10, in the order I finished them, with notes on others.
Helen Garner, Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004)
Garner’s The First Stone was one of the books everybody read in Australia in the mid-’90s; this was effectively its sequel, another gripping combination of crime reportage, memoir, sociology and philosophy. It was particularly resonant as the protagonists were ANU students, and the late-’90s Canberra setting was plenty familiar; I picked it up during a visit to Australia (including Canberra) a few Christmases ago and read it on the flight home.
Tom Chesshyre, How Low Can You Go? Round Europe for 1p Each Way (Plus Tax) (2007)
A terrific travel-book concept, which the book itself more than lives up to. Chesshyre writes about all those unfamiliar destinations that have opened up to UK tourists in the past decade, with chapters on places like Tallinn, Brno and Ljubljana, making for an entertaining combination of the exotic and the mundane. Along the way he also reflects on the changing airline industry and its environmental impact. Something for everyone, then, who has ever taken or condemned anyone taking a cheap flight.
Other notable travel books read: Bollocks to Alton Towers: Uncommonly British Days Out, which took me an age to finish (it’s more guidebook than narrative) but had its moments; A Piano in the Pyrenees, the latest amiable instalment from Tony Hawks; The Amateur Emigrant by Robert Louis Stevenson, recounting his late-nineteenth-century voyage to and across America; Attention All Shipping: A Journey Round the Shipping Forecast by Charlie Connelly, which was much better than it sounds; and I Believe in Yesterday: A 2000-Year Tour Through the Filth and Fury of Living History by still my favourite comedy travel writer, Tim Moore.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City (2006)
I read a few books reporting and examining the military madness of the past decade in 2008 and 2009: Chris Ayres’s War Reporting for Cowards, Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats, and finally this. All were good, but Chandrasekaran’s was best at laying bare the foolhardiness of it all. It inspired a Matt Damon movie, Green Zone, which I haven’t seen.
Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions (2008)
For a few years now I’ve been co-teaching a course on decision-making (among other things), and watching the literature shift in its focus from the rational to the irrational. Ariely’s book is a great popular account of research into the latter, which will make you look at your own life decisions in new ways. Other good books I read on similar subjects were The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz (and heard him speak about it in Glasgow last year) and The Black Swan: The Impacts of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, which I was in the middle of reading when our flight home from Spain was cancelled because of volcanic ash.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
I’ve read only a handful of novels since 2007: a couple of Ian McEwans (The Cement Garden and On Chesil Beach), Andrey Kurkov’s Death and the Penguin (very Russian), Lisa Lutz’s The Spellman Files (amusing US detective novel picked up at an airport; they seem to be marketing it as chick-lit in the UK), and the ubiquitious Steig Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (as an audiobook on the iPod, which was fun). Oh, and Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion early in 2007; I’m still only a third of the way through The System of the World.
All of them were left in the dust, if not the ash, the dark, the radioactive and/or climate-change gloom, of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. An incredible book, and as the father of a young son an almost unbearable read at times. I haven’t seen the movie of this, either.
Tom Parker Bowles, The Year of Eating Dangerously (2006)
He is indeed Camilla’s son, but I only learned that on Wikipedia just now; when I read the book earlier this year I neither knew nor cared. The fact is, Parker Bowles writes a fine travelogue, which is what this is: he eats his way around the more obscure corners of the earth and their menus, sampling eels, blowfish, dogmeat and barnacles. The food may sometimes sound stomach-turning (although other times enticing), but the settings and his descriptions are always vivid—he left me keen to see Laos, Galicia and Sicily—and the author himself comes across as thoroughly likeable, whoever his stepdad is.
Other adventure-travel books read: Robert Twigger’s Voyageur: Across the Rocky Mountains in a Birchbark Canoe, a long but always compelling account of man versus river; and Owen Chase’s 1821 Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, an incredible tale of survival that inspired Melville to write Moby-Dick. I’m also halfway through Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World.
Tom Shone, Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer (2004)
A wonderful account of the emergence of the Hollywood blockbuster, and a defence of its finest examples against critics who would have the 1970s be all about Scorsese and not at all about Spielberg. For anyone who grew up with Star Wars, Indiana Jones and the Terminator, it’s a great read.
Other pop-culture reading included Mike Oldfield’s autobiography Changeling (one or two amusing anecdotes, but really only for fans), Toby Young’s The Sound of No Hands Clapping, and volumes IV and V of Clive James’s memoirs about his years as TV critic and presenter.
Michael Meyer, 1989: The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall (2009)
I read this on the train from Edinburgh to London a month ago. Meyer’s account of that memorable year is full of surprises, revealing the behind-the-scenes machinations that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, most involving people we’ve never heard of but all should have.
Other historical reads: Edmund White, The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris (handy to read just before a visit, as I did); Alan Gurney, Compass: A Story of Exploration and Innovation; Larry Gonick, The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Parts I and II; and Giles Milton’s Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of Islam’s City of Tolerance, which I really should get around to finishing (it was too sobering to finish in one hit).
Michael Foley, The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to be Happy (2010)
I have Amazon reviewers to thank for this one. It may sound like self-help, but it’s something other than that: self-help for society, perhaps. Foley unpicks the absurdities of modern life in just about every domain, and counters them with what can only be called wisdom. A combination of philosophy and sociology, written by an IT lecturer and novelist, which deserves a wide audience.
Amazon Kindle 3G, 3rd Generation
Not a title for number ten, but a device. I bought one of these in September after another month of lugging 100-page dissertation printouts back and forth from work. Now that everything gets submitted electronically in our school, I can convert them and put them onto something that weighs 247g instead. DRM issues and uncompetitive e-book pricing are a non-issue so far: public domain ebooks from Project Gutenberg (like The Worst Journey in the World) have kept me going while travelling, which is when it’s really come into its own. At home I have far too many unread books near at hand, after all.
So that’s it: four years of books-reading, give or take a couple of dozen titles. Who knows if it’ll be another four years before I do it again.
Before leaving this round-up, some bonus book-plugging for a couple of friends: Shauna Reid’s The Amazing Adventures of Dietgirl and Alastair Sim’s The Unbelievers. Shauna’s name will be well-known to anyone who’s read this blog over the years, as will the name of one of the bit players in her book. Alastair’s is a detective novel set in Victorian Edinburgh, with some unusual touches and a delicious ending. I enjoyed both books a lot, but my critical distance may be suspect. Buy them anyway.
31 December 2010