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

[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!