the books of 2003

[devi]

My, I've been a bookworm.


Mark Haddon: "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time"
Ben Elton: "Dead Famous"
Haruki Murakami: "Sputnik Sweetheart"
David Lodge: "Thinks..."
Jonathan Lethem: "Amnesia Moon"
Alasdair Gray: "Lanark"
Milan Kundera: "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"
Dylan Thomas: "Under Milk Wood"
Jonathan Franzen: "The Corrections"
A. S. Byatt: "The Biographer's Tale"
Yann Martel: "Life of Pi"
Russell Hoban: "Riddley Walker"
Will Ferguson: "Happiness(tm)"
Jonathan Safran Foer: "Everything Is Illuminated"
Donna Tartt: "The Secret History"
Kate Atkinson: "Behind the Scenes at the Museum"
Chuck Palahniuk: "Choke"
Banana Yoshimoto: "Goodbye Tsugumi"
Dan Rhodes: "Anthropology"
Ted Hughes: "Birthday Letters"
Louise Wener: "Goodnight Steve McQueen"
Erica Jong: "Parachutes & Kisses"
(chunks of) The Journals of Sylvia Plath
Roger McGough: "Blazing Fruit"
Sylvia Plath: "The Bell Jar"
Ian McEwan: "Atonement"
Maggie O'Farrell: "My Lover's Lover"
Chris Ware: "Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid On Earth"
Sarah Champion (ed): "Disco Biscuits"
Toby Litt: "Deadkidsongs"
Tibor Fischer: "The Collector Collector"
Annie Proulx: "Accordion Crimes"
Nick Hornby: "31 Songs"
Jim Crace: "The Devil's Larder"
Will Self: "Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys"
Mark Dunn: "Ella Minnow Pea"


Favourites: Lanark (combines reality and fantasy and does them both brilliantly. Wise and unsettling and utterly riveting. Book of the year by a long shot). Honourable mentions: Life of Pi, Everything is Illuminated, Riddley Walker, The Secret History, Anthropology, Birthday Letters
Least favourites: This is harder for books, since if I hate a book I don't usually persevere to the end. But see 'most disappointing'. Oh, there is one: Happiness(tm) wanted to be clever, but felt like several hundred tired old urban myths and email forwards dumped in a blender.
Funniest: Thinks..., Behind the Scenes at the Museum (in a black, blitz-humour sort of way), Everything is Illuminated (when it wasn't being tragic), bits of Parachutes & Kisses.
Most disappointing: Atonement, The Biographer's Tale (both by authors whose other books I'd enjoyed, neither of these did anything for me at all).
Weirdness award: Possibly Riddley Walker, which is in post-apocalyptic mangled English and may remove your ability to spell. Or Anthropology, a hundred hundred-word stories about a hundred peculiar girlfriends.

Comments

[triskellian]

I've been making increasingly half-hearted attempts at The Biographer's Tale for about three years, and never getting anywhere at all. I was so excited about it when I first found it, because I was working for a psychometric test publisher, and Francis Galton is one of the people credited with inventing the things, but I never clicked with it. Glad it's not just me ;-)

I did rather like the beginning bits of Atonement, but Adele Geras's Facing the Light does the same country house party stuff much better, without getting bogged down in war (and without the horrible ending). Shame about the title, though.

Oh, and Behind the Scenes at the Museum! I'd forgotten about that - it's my favourite of hers, and the only one I don't own. Must put those WHSmith vouchers to use...

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

Yeah... TBT has the ingredients of something wonderful. I'm trying and failing to come up with some sort of cake-related metaphor here. I think the bit I enjoyed most was the story of Elmer Bole's life (because I want it :) ) but there were so many layers of less interesting narrative between it and me. Sigh.

Have you read Kate A's short stories (Not the End of the World)? I've been thinking of getting that...

[triskellian]

If I got as far as Elmer Bole, I've forgotten ;-(

Kate Atkinson: I actually own Not the end of the world, and had forgotten about it until this moment! I bought it during term-time, so had no time to read it, and had evidently been side-tracked by the time I was allowed to read it. I did read a few of them, and enjoyed them, but, IIRC, they were more like vignettes than actual stories. And I think I had the problem I often do with short stories, where my brain's marked the book as a novel, so the setting has to be more different than she managed for me to re-set between stories ;-)

[the-heiress.livejournal.com]

How do you remember all this?! I can barely remember what I read yesterday.

I've just started Riddley Walker, though I confess I'm not too keen on it so may not get beyond 30 pages. I rarely give up on a book, but it's happened several times in the last month. I even postponed finishing Douglas Coupland's Hey Nostradamus! after receiving it for Christmas because it's just so bloody bleak. Shame on me.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

How do I remember? Um. This might be quite sad, but I actually kept a list throughout the year. Otherwise I forget what I've read. Would forget own head if not screwed on etc etc.

It's partly to assuage my guilt at not having made anything really good, progressed my life in a big way, or whatever. This way I can tell myself I at least read and watched lots of good stuff and hopefully it'll boil down into idea-porridge in my head and something good will come out eventually.

I got hooked on Riddley very quickly. It seems to be a Marmite sort of book. And it was fun to fire up Multimap and match all the placenames to their current equivalents in Kent.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

Have to say I don't think you should bother with the rest of Riddley if you didn't like the start: the way it's written is most of its charm I'd say, and if that annoys you there isn't much else to persevere for.

From my limited experience (2 books) Russell Hoban is an original-ideas man, ambitious, determined to blaze trails that none have blazed before. He may overreach himself I think. But what valiant attempts!

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

I was similarly disappointed by The Biographer's Tale. Where Possession entangled you in the passion of an academic's quest, TBT seemed self-contained and cold. Like The Name of the Rose versus Foucault's Pendulum.

'Clever' is the best word to sum up Happiness&trade. Clever like undergraduates think they're clever.

What did you make of Thinks...? It's the only David Lodge I've read and I found it hysterical, but maybe I appreciated my knowledge of pop cognitive science being flattered.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

TBT: Exactly. At the risk of sounding like some sort of Catherine Cookson-reader, I fell in love with the characters in Possession and was hoping TBT would be similar, but Phineas G spent all his time insisting that a biographer should not put too much of himself into his work. Which is fine in biographical theory, okay, but in this case just seemed like an excuse for Byatt not to have to do much characterisation. In the end, I didn't give a damn what happened to him.

Thinks... was hilarious. I loved the essays on being a bat. Aside from the jokes, though, I'm interested in stories of arts people and science people attempting to communicate, since I've been on both sides of the divide, and thought this was well done. It had an interesting structure too - the pattern of one chapter which just quotes their dialogue, like a screenplay, then a chapter where he thinks it over, then a third where she thinks it over. It's hard to do that sort of screenplayish dialogue and be interesting, but DL made it interesting *and* funny. Kudos.