A Visit From The Goon Squad – Jennifer Egan

The Goon Squad being time, as we see the effects of the winged chariot on a group of characters from their 1970s rock’n’roll heyday through assorted crises (drugs, prison, kleptomania) towards various degrees of middle-aged acceptance.

Each chapter tells its own tale, and adopts its own narrative strategy including such unlikely formats as a second person section and even a powerpoint demonstration. The risk is that the novel will become incoherent, but Egan knows exactly what she is doing and instead the emotional affect is cumulative and powerful.

The Wrong Set – Angus Wilson

Wilson brilliantly documents the concerns of the wealthy classes in the immediate post-war period in this short story collection. Both sympathetic and satirical towards its characters, it makes for a terrific read.

Incidentally, is this the worst cover ever inflicted upon a serious literary book? I can’t even identify which story it’s supposed to relate to!

My Family and Other Animals – Gerald Durrell

A re-read from fondly remembered English classes at school. I wasn’t surprised that my overall remembered impression was correct, in that this is a light-hearted episodic portrait of a rich family staying in sun-drenched Corfu in the 1930s, focussed on the author’s interest in the local wildlife. What surprised me was how much detail I recalled from 25 years ago; the roaming tortoises and the constant chirp of the cicadas (the first time I had heard of them I think).

Nostalgic on two levels.

Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens

Dickens’ last completed novel is a dense affair, combining so many plot strands and complex, almost experimental, techniques that I found myself rather at sea at times, especially during the central sections.

It’s also dense thematically. Many familiar Dickensian tropes appear, such as prominent father-daughter relationships, but the ubiquity of death and the ever-present mounds of “dust” towering over London and concealing all sorts of sinister secrets. I wasn’t surprised by the number of Macbeth references revealed by the footnotes, this is even bleaker than, er, Bleak House.

Reading Year in Review – 2011

I finished the KJV Bible this year and, as I counted each book individually in the list below, provides and inflated figure of 123 books this year. A more realistic measurement comes from discounting all of the the biblical books except each of the gospels plus Revelation, giving a toal of 101 valid books. Pretty solid, especially given the number of great big Victorian doorstops included.

Best Book: Phineas Finn, just edging out Winter's Bone and The Stranger's Child

Worst Book: The Seven Basic Plots (Easy choice, this)

Longest Book: Dombey and Son (1040 pages)

Non-Fiction Books: 14

Australian Authors: 1 (!)

Female Authors: 25 (up from a pathetic 12 last year)

1 Can You Forgive Her? - Anthony Trollope
2 Summer Crossing - Truman Capote
3 The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery
4 Oroonoko - Aphra Behn
5 Libra - Don DeLillo
6 The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy
7 Case Histories - Kate Atkinson
8 The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, or the murder at Road Hill House - Kate Summerscale
9 Loving - Henry Green
10 News of a Kidnapping - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
11 Living - Henry Green
12 Raffles - E.W. Hornung
13 Party Going - Henry Green
14 Mr Standfast - John Buchan
15 Matthew
16 The Lacuna - Barbara Kingsolver
17 The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
18 The Story of the Night - Colm Toibin
19 Moon Tiger - Penelope Lively
20 By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept - Elizabeth Smart
21 Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges
22 Mark
23 The Unfortunate Traveller - Thomas Nashe
24 The Famished Road - Ben Okri
25 Blow Your House Down - Pat Barker
26 Luke
27 The Bone People - Keri Hulme
28 John
29 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
30 An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
31 Room - Emma Donoghue
32 Acts of the Apostles
33 Such Darling Dodos - Angus Wilson
34 Death In Venice - Thomas Mann
35 Romans
36 The No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith
37 The Children Of Men - P.D. James
38 Phineas Finn - Anthony Trollope
39 1 Corinthians
40 Go Tell It On The Mountain - James Baldwin
41 2 Corinthians
42 Galatians
43 Ephesians
44 Philippians
45 Colossians
46 The Talented Mr Ripley - Patricia Highsmith
47 1 Thessalonians
48 2 Thessalonians
49 Slow Chocolate Autopsy - Iain Sinclair & Dave McKean
50 The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England - Ian Mortimer
51 Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi - Geoff Dyer
52 Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth
53 The Island of Doctor Moreau - H.G. Wells
54 1 Timothy
55 2 Timothy
56 Titus
57 Philemon
58 Winter’s Bone - Daniel Woodrell
59 Under The Net - Iris Murdoch
60 Hebrews
61 James
62 1 Peter
63 2 Peter
64 1 John
65 2 John
66 3 John
67 Jude
68 Quarantine - Jim Crace
69 Revelation
70 Family and Friends - Anita Brookner
71 Don Juan - Lord Byron
72 The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
73 The History of Mr Polly - H.G. Wells
74 The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch
75 Landscape of Farewell - Alex Miller
76 The Getaway - Jim Thompson
77 Hideous Kinky - Esther Freud
78 Mr Weston’s Good Wine - T.F. Powys
79 The Stranger’s Child - Alan Hollinghurst
80 An Education - Lynn Barber
81 A Landing On The Sun - Michael Frayn
82 Nicholas Nickleby - Charles Dickens
83 The Empty Family - Colm Toibin
84 The Matisse Stories - A.S. Byatt
85 Wish You Were Here - Graham Swift
86 Adventures in the Screen Trade - William Goldman
87 Love etc - Julian Barnes
88 Erewhon - Samuel Butler
89 Morbo; the story of Spanish football - Phil Ball
90 Mondo Desperado - Patrick McCabe
91 The Blackwater Lightship - Colm Toibin
92 Tor!; the story of German football - Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger
93 How I Escaped My Certain Fate - Stewart Lee
94 The Psychopath Test - Jon Ronson
95 Dombey and Son - Charles Dickens
96 Reflections in a Golden Eye - Carson McCullers
97 Which Lie Did I Tell? - William Goldman
98 Cheri - Colette
99 Diary - Chuck Palahniuk
100 Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
101 Deliverance - James Dickey
102 Tono-Bungay - H.G. Wells
103 The Seven Basic Plots; why we tell stories - Christopher Booker
104 Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
105 Kim - Rudyard Kipling
106 Is Heathcliff a Murderer? - John Sutherland
107 The Assistant - Bernard Malamud
108 The Happy Prince and other stories - Oscar Wilde
109 The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer
110 The Big Money - John Dos Passos
111 Notre Dame of Paris - Victor Hugo
112 The Comforters - Muriel Spark
113 Innocence - Penelope Fitzgerald
114 Skinny Dip - Carl Hiaasen
115 The Soft Machine - William Burroughs
116 H.G. – The History of Mr Wells - Michael Foot
117 Craven House - Patrick Hamilton
118 The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner - Alan Sillitoe
119 Lucia’s Progress - EF Benson
120 All That I Am - Anna Funder
121 Hell’s Angels - Hunter S. Thompson
122 Slouching Towards Bethlehem - Joan Didion
123 The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes

The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes

This quietly impressive and affecting novella won this year’s Booker. It’s a respectable enough choice, although the twist doesn’t quite work for me, as it raises too many questions about certain character motivations.

Thematically, the main theme is the unreliability of memory, and the implications of this are worked through interestingly.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem – Joan Didion

Joan Didion is a truly splendid writer, and this essay collection provides a superlative overview of 1960s America from a contemporary perspective. The more personal essays are slightly less involving, but the title piece on the Haight-Ashbury movement is quite brilliant.