Christmas is coming, and it should soon be time to sit back and relax. The world hasn’t quite gone to hell in a handcart – although it may seem that way on a regular basis – so why not grab a good book, curl up in your favourite spot and select a nice quiet read.
With this in mind, I’ve drawn up a list of some of my favourite reads from this year. You may agree, you may not; you may have read – or tried to read – some of these yourself, you may not. But, hey, this is my list, maybe you’ll find something you’ll like on it, so, whatever, are you sitting comfortably?
The one I had to read
Mick Herron, Clown Town. This was bought for me by my wife. And obviously I was going to read it. I’ve been a fan since long before Apple brought out the TV series, when I bought Slow Horses years ago, by accident. Grabbed by the first sentence, I slipped off the fast track and into the first book, then kept on as Herron brought out more. Back to this year: Lamb is as gloriously horrible as we all wish we could be on occasion (although we hope we never are), and River Cartwright is, well, River Cartwright. If you know, you know. And the book is well worth the read.
Read it, read it again
Michiko Aoyama, What you are looking for is in the library, translated by Alison Watts. This was a pleasant surprise from someone else’s recommendations earlier this year. This book is in some ways a collection, in others a novel, as all the stories intertwine, mesh and come together. I suspect, and hope, that in here there is at least one story that will grab you personally, and you will be able to say ‘oh, that’s me’.
Not in every detail. For a start I don’t have an innate understanding of Japanese culture. But there will be something, and it’ll creep up on you, slowly, subtly, and – before you know it – it will be *your* story. The one that speaks to you most.
I love this one, it’s just a quiet joy. I borrowed it from the library, then I bought my own copy because I know it’s one to re-read, a lot.
The one I always come back to
William Golding, Lord of the Flies. No, scrub that, don’t be daft. Yes, many of us will have read it, perhaps at school – and if you haven’t, do.
No, mine is The Inheritors (closely followed by The Spire). It follows, literally, a small tribe of Neanderthals as they make the journey from their winter home to their summer space. With no concept of the past or the future, they simply ‘are’. Then they meet the ‘New People’, Homo Sapiens (Homo Narrativus, surely?). All does not go well. This is a story of simple, instinctual living vs jealousy, violence and ritualistic behaviour. A collision of old and new, of lives lived apart.
Exploring themes of loss of innocence, clash of cultures, fear of ‘other’ – it’s very much a book for our times.
Things that go bump in the night
As already mentioned, it’s that time of the year. The nights have already drawn in, Christmas (or the solstice, take your pick) is coming. It’s a time for gathering close, and telling tales to scare each other. Admit it, you love those cold, invisible fingers running down your spine, that chill, that shiver, as much as I do.
So, it has to be an M R James. And the wonderful thing here is that, rather than just getting one story, it will be a collection! Still, the one that gets me that perfect shiver is always The Mezzotint. Just writing the title gives me that sense of delicious wrongness. And if you don’t want (or are unable) to sit and read, then I heartily recommend getting hold of The Mezzotint & other moving stories, as performed by Robert Lloyd Parry. Gather round the TV, turn off the lights and just enjoy the storytelling.
The future is bleak (but it doesn’t have to be)
Naomi Alderman, The Future. Three tech billionaires – barely disguised versions of Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos – with bunkers ready for when the world ends. They’ve got early-warning systems on their phones. Not for us, obviously. For them. So they can scarper while we’re left to deal with whatever apocalypse their platforms helped create.
It’s clever, occasionally too clever for its own good, with a non-linear timeline that can be dizzying, but Alderman knows her tech dystopia inside out. There’s a love story, biblical allegory (with a lot of the story of Lot), a survivalist blogger and an ex-cult leader’s daughter. It all coheres into something darkly funny and genuinely thought-provoking. Not quite the gut-punch of her earlier The Power, but it’s definitely a book for right now. Tech billionaires really are building bunkers, and we’re all reading and watching, glued to the slow-motion car crash as its resulting monstrosities unfold on our feeds and TVs.
Yet, somehow, against all odds, Alderman finds a way forward that doesn’t feel like wishful thinking. She explores what the future actually means to different people, what it may take to stand up to power when the powerful have already written their own escape clauses, and whether trust between strangers might matter more than all the predictive algorithms in the world.
One ‘last’ offering from me?
This was tricky, so I’m going to cheat and let you decide. Percival Everett’s James, or perhaps The Trees? I read both over a period of six days; both worth the read, both the same, both quite different.
The Trees is horror story, detective noir and savage satire all at once. It’s no earnest novel about racism, but something far stranger and more uncomfortable – and the stronger for it. There’s a 105-year-old woman who’s been documenting every lynching since she was born, plus absurdly named characters, and dialogue that slices through. It’s darkly funny in ways that’ll make you check over your shoulder before you laugh, and you definitely won’t want to share the joke: it would just make friends and family worry about you. Yet it’s a deadly serious read about a history America would rather forget. Shortlisted for the Booker prize, and impossible to shake off until after you’ve finished, and possibly not even then.
James, is an inversion of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, which reveals Jim not as ‘Jim, the slave’, but as ‘James, the man’. The intelligent, calculated thinking that he had to hide to enable him to survive, the performance required just to stay alive in a world that won’t see you as fully human. There’s language-code-switching (English to dialect, dialect to English), a stint with a travelling minstrel show where the relatively light-skinned James is made to wear blackface, and so much more. It won the Pulitzer prize, the National Book Award, and is now heading for a Spielberg adaptation. Harrowing, yes, but rollicking and with his trademark dark humour, Everett pulls off something remarkable – he gives James his full humanity while never letting us forget the brutality of the world he’s navigating. Better than the original, frankly, and that’s saying something.
To read, perchance to dream
And there we have it: my list of six(-ish) good reads, a listicle for the cold winter days; for after that brisk walk on the chilly moors, the long and tiring pre-Christmas shopping trip, or that hard day at work that seemed like it would never end.
Enjoy.
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