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

[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.