End of the Book Year 2024/25

I’m going all out, throwing caution to the wind, letting what befalls me, befall me. I’m choosing two, yes TWO books of the year and I don’t care who knows it. I didn’t want to decide, so I didn’t try to decide. Why dig below happy enjoyment to uplift one book at the expense of another? I won’t do it, I tell you!

Books of the Year 2024/25 are:

The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner and

Troubles by J G Farrell

The List

June

  • Collected Stories, V.S.Pritchett
  • Last Exit to Brooklyn, Hubert Selby Jnr
  • The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, Peter Ackroyd
  • One Way of Love, Gamel Woolsey (great name)
  • Quarantine, Jim Crace
  • July
  • A Void, Georges Perec
  • The Color Purple, Alice Walker
  • The Killings at Badger’s Drift, Caroline Graham
  • Another Country, James Baldwin
  • Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood
  • August
  • The Old Wives’ Tale, Arnold Bennett
  • The Daydreamer, Ian McEwan
  • The Secret Hours, Mick Herron
  • The Unlit Lamp, Radclyffe Hall
  • Wayward Girls and Wicked Women, Ed. Angela Carter
  • September
  • The Corner That Held Them, Sylvia Townsend Warner
  • The Leopard, Tomasi di Lampedusa
  • The Old Devils, Kingsley Amis
  • Ringworld, Larry Niven
  • Sunlight: Roger Ackling, Exhibition Book
  • Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes
  • In Ascension, Martin MacInnes (why do so many contemporary books feel so ‘limp’?)
  • October
  • The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, Aldous Huxley (read it so you don’t have to do it, cf. February Wolfe)
  • Play it as it Lays, Joan Didion
  • August 1914, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
  • Women in Love, D.H.Lawrence
  • They Shoot Horses Don’t They? Horace McCoy
  • November
  • Dear Life, Alice Munro
  • For Your Eyes Only, Ian Fleming
  • Cause for Alarm, Eric Ambler
  • Fire in the Blood, Irène Némirovsky
  • The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu (so many women shuttered away waiting for men, it got depressing)
  • December
  • J, Howard Jacobson
  • Maigret’s First Case, Simenon
  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick
  • Mystery in White, J. Jefferson Farjeon
  • The Aristos, John Fowles
  • Three Classical Comedies: ‘Thirty Bob’, ‘The Cross Old Devil’, ‘Prisoners of War’, Trans. H.C.Fay
  • The Debt of Pleasure, John Lanchester
  • January
  • The Hopkins Manuscript, R.C.Sherriff
  • The Formation of a Persecuting Society, R.I.Moore (an old tutor of mine. Reading it 30 years late.)
  • ‘Equus’, Peter Shaffer
  • A Perfect Spy, John Le Carré
  • The Boys From Brazil, Ira Levin
  • The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey
  • February
  • The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe (cf. October Huxley)
  • The Revolution of Everyday Life, Raoul Vanetgem
  • The King in Yellow, Robert W. Chambers
  • The Guilty River, Wilkie Collins
  • London Fields, Martin Amis
  • March
  • General Belinda, Ethel Carnie Holdsworth
  • Troubles, J.G.Farrell
  • The Ginger Man, J.P. Donleavy
  • ‘The Royal Hunt of the Sun’, Peter Shaffer
  • ‘Play With a Tiger’, Doris Lessing
  • ‘Billy Liar’, Keith Waterhouse, Willis Hall
  • April
  • The Judas Window, Carter Dickson
  • The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster
  • The Group, Mary McCarthy
  • Life After God, Douglas Coupland
  • May
  • Best Thinking Machine Detective Stories, Jacques Futrelle
  • Making Conversation, Christine Longford
  • The Good Soldier Švejk, Jaroslav Hašek
  • The Secret Scripture, Sebastian Barry

2025/26 has started with The Eustace Diamonds by Antony Trollope.