books

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.

End of the Book Year 2023/24

A Burnt-Out Case by Graham Greene. Recent acquisition. Not yet read.

(Skip to the end if you just want the list of books.)

A good numbers year, sixty-two books read if I’ve counted right. My bookmarks must be wearing away (🤔).

There were quite a few non fiction books in the mix, including a run of four around February. Thanks to my son for pushing the J G Ballard’s under my nose. They are very good and he has a stack more I can borrow. The local Womens Centre’s library is also proving to be an excellent resource, especially for older books. I like swapping from one writer, genre, country, time, format etc to another and it makes me smile that I followed the Feminist Book Society’s How We Come Back Stronger with Fleming’s Goldfinger. Superb pairing. Incidentally the golf scene in the latter is gripping.

There were some surprises and diversions on the way. Greenmantle by Buchan had about 40 pages missing, only discovered mid-read. For 20p I couldn’t grumble (but I did). The Medieval Women book was written by the mother of my favourite tutor at university – Conrad Leyser. Houses of Power by Thurley had me designing my own Tudor palace, (just how many withdrawing rooms do I need?) I visited a Tudor Hall this week and walked in its Long Gallery. Great to experience something you’ve read about. I enjoyed Desperate Remedies and generally like Hardy, but I got stuck for weeks on that book. Le Carré I have to purposely read slow so it isn’t over too soon.

There were some howling duds in the mix, but I won’t mention them. ‘Well dones’ to Ballard, Brand and Thurley, Special Mention for Andrea Newman for An Evil Streak, but

Book of the Year 2023/24 goes to

Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig.

2024/25 has started with the Collected stories of V S Pritchett. This year I’ll also get up to date with my card catalogue of books I’ve read. Much more enjoyable than an excel sheet. Thanks for reading, would love to read any book comments, recommendations you have.

  • The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton
  • The Book of Chameleons, José Eduardo Agualura
  • An Unsuitable Attachment, Barbara Pym
  • Money, Martin Amis
  • Medieval Women A Social History of Women in England 450 – 1500, Henrietta Leyser
  • The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Angela Carter
  • Girl With a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier
  • The Drowned World, J.G. Ballard
  • True History of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey
  • In the Prison of Her Skin, Violette Leduc
  • The Unmapped Country, Stories and Fragments, Ann Quin
  • The Quantum Universe Everything that can happen does happen, Brian Cox, Jeff Forshaw
  • Kolymsky Heights, Lionel Davidson
  • Life and Times of Michael K, J.M. Coetzee
  • Holiday, Stanley Middleton
  • Westmorland Alone, Ian Sansom
  • An Anthology of Seventeenth Century Fiction, ed Paul Salzman
  • Green For Danger, Christianna Brand
  • The Snow Ball, Brigid Brophy
  • Rappaccini’s Daughter,Young Goodman Brown, A Select Party, Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • Family Roundabout, Richmal Crompton
  • Jeeves in the Offing, P.G. Wodehouse
  • The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye Five Fairy Stories, A.S. Byatt
  • An Evil Streak, Andrea Newman
  • Affinity, Sarah Waters
  • Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  • Temporary, Hilary Leichter
  • The Rising of the Moon, Gladys Mitchell
  • Beware of Pity, Stefan Zweig
  • Reader I Murdered Him, ed. Jen Green
  • My Sister, The Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
  • This is How We Come Back Stronger, ed. Feminist Book Society
  • Goldfinger, Ian Fleming
  • Bibliomaniac, Robin Ince
  • Miss Pym Disposes, Josephine Tey
  • High-Rise, J.G. Ballard
  • W.H. Auden Poems Tell me the truth about love, Pub. Faber
  • The Northern Clemency, Philip Hensher
  • The Hollow Man, John Dickson Carr
  • The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher
  • Brutal North, Simon Phipps
  • Houses of Power, Simon Thurley
  • Britain BC, Francis Pryor
  • Necessary Rites, Janice Elliott
  • Greenmantle, John Buchan
  • Alfred Hitchcock’s Ghostly Gallery
  • Silverview, John le Carré
  • The Life and Loves of a She Devil, Fay Weldon
  • The Habit of Loving, Doris Lessing
  • The Moving Toyshop, Edmund Crispin
  • The Celts A Sceptical History, Simon Jenkins
  • Desperate Remedies, Thomas Hardy
  • The Crystal World, J.G. Ballard
  • The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker
  • Ice, Anna Kavan
  • Micawber’s Ailment, Lucy Ann Watt
  • Poison For Teacher, Nancy Spain
  • Feminism Before the First Wave, Zoë Fairbairns, Five Leaves Bookshop Occasional Papers
  • Not A River, Selva Almada, trans. A McDermott
  • Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
  • The Gazebo, Patricia Wentworth

End of the Book Year 2022/23

The book year ended and then another one started. Just like that. It’s almost as if it is an ongoing activity.

What a made up thing, what a sickening pose. And it annoys list liking people (LLP) by endng in May. They’re half way through their year and won’t talk about it until January.

Every now and then you hit a particularly plush purple patch with a string of books and this happened in September/October with Angela Carter, Toni Morrison and Irene Némirovsky. Only looking back now do I realise there was a Cormac McCarthy stuck in the middle. A fairly standard adventure story, I thought, but perhaps it acted as an excellent foil for the other three.

Complete and utter duds? No, but Tara Westover reminded me I don’t like people writing their true stories and that reading books others tell me I must read, rarely turns out well. I was also rather glad that Banana Yoshimoto’s book was thin.

Anyway. Below is a list of the books I’ve read this Book Year. At the end, I’ve chosen my favourite.

  • Exemplary Stories, Cervantes
  • On Beauty, Zadie Smith
  • The Penguin Book of the Contemporary Short Story, Ed. Philip Hensher
  • The Female Detective, Andrew Forrester
  • Dark As the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid, Malcolm Lowry
  • Kitchen, Banana Yoshimoto
  • Deep South, Paul Theroux
  • Memoirs of a Cavalier, Daniel Defoe
  • That Uncertain Feeling, Kingsley Amis
  • The Dove’s Nest, Unfinished Stories, Something Childish, Katherine Mansfield
  • Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll
  • Austerlitz, W.G.Sebald
  • Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter
  • The Road, Cormac McCarthy
  • Beloved, Toni Morrison
  • Suite Francaise, Irène Nèmirovsky
  • Palaces of Revolution Life, Death & Art at the Stuart Court, Simon Thurley
  • The Tenderness of Wolves, Stef Penney
  • Educated A Memoir, Tara Westover
  • Death on the Cherwell, Mavis Doriel Hay
  • A Scot’s Quair: Sunset Song, Cloud Howe, Grey Granite, Lewis Grassic Gibbon
  • To Love and Be Wise, Josephine Tey
  • The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
  • My Cousin Rachel, Daphne Du Maurier
  • The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
  • Women & Power A Manifeato, Mary Beard
  • Daughters of Decadence Women Writers of the Fin de Siecle, Ed. Elaine Showalter
  • The Imagination Chamber, Philip Pullman
  • The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, Robert Kirk. Intro. Andrew Lang
  • My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante
  • The Hearing Trumpet, Leonora Carrington
  • The Mirror & the Light, Hilary Mantel
  • Murder in Piccadilly, Charles Kingston
  • Ten Poems of Hope, Various. Candlestick Press
  • The Wall, John Lanchester
  • SPQR A History of Ancient Rome, Mary Beard
  • A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood
  • Forbidden Notebook, Alba de Céspedes
  • The Stepford Wives, Ira Levin
  • The Picador Book of Latin American Stories, Ed. Carlos Fuentes, Julio Ortega
  • The Bloater, Rosemary Tonks
  • The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, Gertrude Stein
  • Our Town and Other Plays, Thornton Wilder
  • The Talented Mr Ripley, Patricia Highsmith
  • The Summer Book, Tove Jansson
  • The Leavenworth Case, Anna Katharine Green
  • All Shot Up, Chester Himes
  • The Burn, James Kelman

The book of the year 2022/23 is:

Nights At the Circus by Angela Carter

The 2023/24 Book Year has atarted with the Luminaries by Eleanor Catton.

Recent Sees II

No Choice Amongst Stinking Fish, 1970/2016 [remake], wool, 100 x 60 cm Charlotte Johannesson (image from Hollybush Gardens) Seen at Nottingham Contemporary
Wood cuts by Cedar Lewisohn. (Image from Exeter Phoenix) Some of these were seen at Bonnington Gallery exhibition, Patois Banton
Phosphorus Malvolio 2020, oil on canvas by Rosalind Nashashibi Seen At Nottingham Contemporary.
Portrait of the Artist’s Son, Paul Cézanne, 1885. Seen at Tate Modern
From, Notes from a City Unknown 2021 by Seher Shah seen at Ikon Gallery Horror in the Modernist Block exhibition

Also been reading Ivon Hitchens by Peter Khoroche

Book of the year 2021/22

The Blurb

I compulsively record the books I read in a little spiral bound grey notebook. Look! It’s above the greetings card in the photo above. For a few years now, I’ve blogged the year’s reading and forced myself to choose a favourite. My reading year runs from June to May.

Book of the Year 2021/22

Milkman by Anna Burns

The List

* I’ve had several conversations with a friend this year about translating, translations and translators, so, for the first  time, I am including the translator next to the author.

  • Ivanhoe, Walter Scott
  • Cancer Ward, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, trans. Nicholas Bethell & David Burg
  • The Kenneth Williams Diaries
  • Selected Essays and Notebooks, Albert Camus, trans. Philip Thody
  • Tales from Ovid, Ted Hughes
  • Roderick Hudson, Henry James
  • Hemlock and After, Angus Wilson
  • Sentimental Tales, Mikhail Zoschenko, trans. Boris Dralyuk
  • Poems of the Late T’ang, trans. A.C. Graham
  • Clayhangar, Arnold Bennett
  • Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu, trans. D.C. Lau
  • Who killed Zebedee?, Wilkie Collins (Audio)
  • Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart
  • Childhood, Youth, Dependency, Tove Ditlevsen, trans. Tiina Nunnally & Michael Favala Goldman
  • Mandoa, Mandoa!, Winifred Holtby
  • Mary Barton, Mrs Gaskell
  • Milkman, Anna Burns
  • The Hand of Ethelberta, Thomas Hardy
  • The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
  • Success and Failure of Picasso, John Berger
  • Clear Horizon, Dorothy Richardson
  • Dimple Hill, Dorothy Richardson
  • March Moonlight, Dorothy Richardson
  • The Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce
  • The Years, Virginia Woolf
  • Troilus and Criseyde, Geoffrey Chaucer, trans. Nevill Coghill
  • The Place of Dead Roads, William Burroughs
  • The Greeks, H.D.F. Kitto
  • A Tale of a Tub, Jonathan Swift
  • Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
  • The Mask of Dimitrios, Eric Ambler
  • The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry
  • Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner
  • Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones
  • Reservoir 13, Jon McGregor
  • The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder
  • Double Cross, Ben MacIntyre
  • The Gathering, Anne Enright
  • Six Yüan Plays, trans. Lin Jung-en
  • From Russia With Love, Ian Fleming
  • Intruder in the Dust, William Faulkner
  • The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid
  • Look at Me Now and Here I Am, Writings & Lectures 1911- 45, Gertrude Stein
  • The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt
  • The Murder of My Aunt, Richard Hull
  • The Story of a Non-Marrying Man & Other Stories, Doris Lessing
  • Flights South, Ed. Charles Behlen
  • Sequins for a Ragged Hem, Amryl Johnson
  • The Bloody Chamber & Other Stories, Angela Carter
  • The Art of Joy, Goliarda Sapienza, trans. Anne Milano Appel
  • Monkey, Wu Ch’êng-Ên, trans. Arthur Waley
  • Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw
  • The Great Adventure of Hare, Alison Uttley
  • Utopia, Thomas More
  • Chaucer An Introduction, S.S. Hussey
  • The Beetle, Richard Marsh
  • Hamnett, Maggie O’Farrell
  • The Communist Manifesto, Max Engels trans. S. Moore
  • Li Po and Tu Fu, trans. Arthur Cooper
  • The Case of the Late Pig, Margery Allingham
  • Breaking the Mould, Sculpture by Women Since 1945
  • Dark Fairy Tales of Fearless Women, Rosalind Kerven
  • The Closed Harbour, James Hanley
  • The Diving-Bell & the Butterfly, Jean-Dominique Bauby
  • Spies, Michael Frayn
  • The Firework Maker’s Daughter, Philip Pullman
  • Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth
  • The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Will Self
  • The Long and the Short and the Tall, Willis Hall
  • Selected Poems by John Betjeman
  • Cassandra A Novel and Four Essays, Christa Wolf, trans. Jan Van Heurck
  • A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Iris Murdoch
  • The Tailor of Panama, John Le Carre

Book of the Year 2020/21

I keep a list of the books I read and at the end of my ‘book year’ (June to May), I choose my favourite.

In a Covid hit year, I suppose it’s not surprising it was a bumper year with 53 books read. The final volume of Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography was ticked off and I took the opportunity to knock off some books that have sat on my ‘to be read’ shelves for decades – Giovanni Vergas, Kipling, Hersey, Paton, Nabakov, Gallico. The psychology of choosing the next book off my shelf is fascinating and I always judge a book by its cover.

Here’s this year’s list in the order of reading:

  • High Wages, Dorothy Whipple
  • A House for Mr Biswas, V.S. Naipaul
  • The Light of Day, Eric Ambler
  • Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace
  • Trumpet, Jackie Kay
  • The Vinland Sagas
  • Anish Kapoor Flashback, Michael Bracewell
  • The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
  • Martin Eden, Jack London
  • All Said and Done, Simone de Beauvoir
  • Saraband, Eliot Bliss
  • Villette, Charlotte Bronte
  • The Book of Forgotten Authors, Christopher Fowler
  • The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, ed. Mark Roskill
  • Ann Veronica, H.G. Wells
  • The Good Terrorist, Doris Lessing
  • The Picador Book of Contemporary American Stories, ed. Tobias Wolff
  • Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Kate Atkinson
  • Every Good Deed & Other Stories, Dorothy Whipple
  • The Jungle Books, Rudyard Kipling
  • The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles
  • Cathedral, Raymond Carver
  • American Notes for General Circulation, Charles Dickens
  • Mastro-Don Gesualdo, Giovanni Verga
  • The Secret Pilgrim, John le Carre
  • The First Lady Chatterley, D.H. Lawrence
  • Common People. An Anthology of Working-Class Writers, ed. Kit de Waal
  • The Quick and the Dead, Joy Williams
  • Feminist City, Leslie Kern
  • Sudden Rain, Maritta Wolff
  • Dark Tales, Shirley Jackson
  • Don’t Point That Thing at Me, Kyril Bonfiglioli
  • Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami
  • Girl, Woman, Other, Bernadine Evaristo
  • Good Behaviour, Molly Keane
  • The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
  • Paula, Isabel Allende
  • Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Cloud Nine, Caryl Churchill
  • Sweet Thursday, John Steinbeck
  • A Legacy of Spies, John le Carre
  • Benefits, Zoe Fairbairns
  • Serpentine, Philip Pullman
  • Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
  • Native Son, Richard Wright
  • Parade’s End, Ford Madox Ford
  • Trouble is my Business, Raymond Chandler
  • The Snow Goose and The Small Miracle, Paul Gallico
  • Ursule Mirouet, Honore Balzac
  • A Room With a View, E.M. Forster
  • Hiroshima, John Hersey
  • Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
  • JPod, Douglas Coupland
  • Bend Sinister, Vladimir Nabakov

And the Book of the year is…

Villette by Charlotte Bronte. An astonishing book.

A close second was Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist. Very funny.

If you’ve read any of the books listed and have a comment or want to make a recommendation, let me know. The 2021/22 book year has started with Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe.