Books Read in 2017

Below is the list of books I managed to read in 2017.

Fiction

1. My Year of Meats (Ruth Ozeki)
2. Sellout (Paul Beatty)
3. Hope—A Tragedy (Shalom Auslander)
4. We (Yevgeny Zamyatin)
5. Epitaph for a Spy (Eric Ambler)
6. Ragtime (E.L. Doctorow)
7. My Brilliant Friend (Elena Ferrante)
8. The Rose of Tibet (Lionel Davidson)
9. Shylock is My Name (Howard Jacobson)
10. Our Kind of Traitor (John Le Carre)
11. The Evenings (Gerard Reve)
12. Madonna in Fur Coat (Sabhattin Ali)
13. Ghosts (Cesar Aira)
14. Sweet Caress (William Boyd)
15. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Re-read) (Ken Kesey)
16. Amsterdam (Re-read) (Ian McEwan)
17. SS-GB (Len Deighton)
18. After the Divorce (Grazia Deledda)
19. In Love (Alfred Hayes)
20. Lincoln in the Bardo (George Saunders)
21. The Woman who went to Bed for A Year (Sue Townsend)
22. The Prime of Mrs Jean Brodie (Re-read) (Muriel Spark)
23. The Outsider (Albert Camus)
24. Here I Am (Jonathan Saffron Foer)
25. Oranges are not the Only Fruit (Jannette Winterson)
26. An Officer and A Spy (Robert Harris)
27. Different Class (Joanna Harris)
28. The Laughing Monsters (Denis Johnson)
29. Days of Abandonment (Elena Ferrante)
30. Conclave (Robert Harris)
31. This Must be the Place (Maggie O’Farrell)
32. Em and the Big Hoom (Jerry Pinto)
33. Mr Hire’s Engagement (Georges Simenon)
34. Autumn (Ali Smith)
35. The End (Hanif Kureishi)
36. UFO in Her Eyes (Xiaolu Guo)
37. Electric Michael Angelo (Sarah Hall)

Non-Fiction

1. Peas and Queues (Sandy Toksvig)
2. Forever Erma (Erma Bombeck)
3. All Out War (Tim Shipman)
4. This Boy (Alan Johnson)
5. Munich Art Hoard (Catherine Heckley)
6. Politics of Washing (Polly Coles)
7. The Renaissance (JH Plumb)

I have taken to buying books from Kindle. I don’t know whether it has become an addiction. It probably is going that way. I have got books on Kindle I bought more than three years previously, and not got round to reading them. You come across names on Kindle you’ve not heard before. You quickly go through some of the readers’ reviews, read the description of the book, and decide to buy the book the author of which you know nothing about. Sometimes the gamble works. Sometimes it doesn’t, as happened with my purchase of Erma Bombeck’s collection of newspaper columns. I can’t now remember what made me buy this collection of Bombeck whose name I had not heard until then (I later discovered thanks to Wikipedia that she was a popular American columnist); probably because it was described as witty. It is not often that I give up on a book, but this book was an exception—a big yawn from beginning to about 20% of the e-book at which time I decided that enough was enough. Sandi Toksvig’s Peas and Queues was similarly a disappointment (although I can’t say that I had not heard of Toksvig, who is a British comedian of reasonable repute). The Italian Renaissance by JC Plumb (another name I had not heard), on the other hand, was first rate—excellently written and very accessible. The Munich Art Hoard is a well-researched account of how an elderly German recluse came to inherit immoral, if not illegal, wealth in the form of paintings of famous artists (Monet, Manet, Chagall, and Munch among others) obtained by his father, quarter-Jewish himself, from the desperate Jewish families hoping to escape the Nazi clutches. The story of Hilderbrand Gurlitt is a lesson of how people who are not inherently evil get corrupted by greed and lose moral scruples. The author of this riveting book is Catherine Hickley who, I was interested to read, is an expert in looted art. I can understand someone being an art-critic or art-expert. What might an expertise in looted art entail? Tracing the provenance of a work of art suspected to have been stolen is a detective work, I would have thought. Perhaps the art expert can confirm whether the discovered piece of art, purporting to be the work of a famous artist is genuine or not. I discovered that there is even a commission for ‘Looted Art’ in Europe, mostly relating to the art looted by the Nazis. Anyway, The Munich Art Hoard is highly recommended even if you don’t have a great deal of interest in what the Nazis got up to. Hickley tells this morally complex story without taking a ride in the morality-hot-air-balloon. The book is an engrossing piece of investigative journalism (it remains that for the best part), but there are passages in the book describing the reclusive Cornelius Hilderbrand (from whom the hidden stash was recovered) which would be worthy to be in a monograph of character analysis by an astute psychologist. I was not a great fan of Alan Johnson, the Labour leader, who was the home secretary for a year towards the end of Gordon Brown’s government. At one point his name was mentioned as the leader of the Labour Party. He has appeared from time to time in the long running satirical quiz on the BBC, Have I Got News for You. In it he comes across as an affable, relaxed man with a gentle sense of humour, who is not exactly groaning under the weight of his personality—one of those men who are nondescript in the sense there is, really, nothing to describe. His memoir, This Boy: A Life, was a revelation. The memoir, which chronicles Johnsons’ growing years, is a moving account of his childhood ridden with indigence, burns with a quiet cadence. It is difficult to believe what Johnson describes was happening not in Victorian times but only sixty years back. Simply written, the memoir is incredibly moving and burns with a quiet cadence.

Another memoir, except that it was packaged as a novel, which I found very affecting was Em and the Big Hoom, the debut novel of the Indian author Jerry Pinto. I came across this novel in the library. I picked it up because the blurb described it as howlingly funny. The novel is not howlingly funny, I should clarify, and could probably have done with better editing. In it Pinto tells the story of his manic-depressive mother (the ‘Em’ in the novel) and her marvellously devoted (and stoic) husband (‘the Big Hoom’). The novel is written with great affection, in simple and tasteful prose, sprinkled with zephyr-like humour. Highly recommended.

My Year of Meats was the first novel that I read in 2017. It was also the first novel of its American-Japanese author, Ruth Ozeki, which I read; and it is Ozeki’s first novel. A lot of firsts. What it was not was a first-rate novel. It wasn’t the most dreadful novel that I have read. It had a good stab at being intelligent and humane. It gave some gut-wrenching (and not wholly germane to the plot) information about cattle ranching and beef treated with hormones (which I suspect are author’s pet topics), but, sadly, I didn’t find it extraordinary, as promised by one of the (selectively edited) reviews on its dust jacket.

Ragtime is the outstanding novel of the American novelist E L Doctorow. Teeming with real-life and fictional characters Ragtime, which starts with the sensational murder (dubbed as the murder of the century), is a riveting account of an important epoch in the twentieth century America. It captures the zeitgeist of the times perfectly. This is a novel about a rapidly changing America and, keeping with the theme, the pace of the narrative doesn’t slacken.

I read two Man Booker Prize winners last year: Sellout, which won the 2016 prize; and Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 award. Neither of the novels appealed much to me. Lincoln in the Bardo is a slender novel with not much of a plot. There is a bizarre and surreal feel to it, and, at times you feel that the bizarreness is an end in itself. Sellout, on the other hand, has a sprawling canvas, and proceeds at a break-neck speed. It is a potpourri of heavy sarcasm, unsubtle messages about the racial tensions in modern day America, and humour like a sledgehammer. A bit too much for me.

Here I Am, the third novel of Jonathan Saffron Foer, is a reflection on what it means to be a modern man in a modern world. Not just any man, but a Jewish man. Better than Foer’s second novel, though not perfect. It is at times an exhausting novel to read, not least because of several subplots and characters, which disappear for long periods only to reappear without warning, which leaves the reader scratching his head.

An Officer and A Spy was the first novel I read of the multi-million-copies-selling Robert Harris. Years ago, I had read Selling Hitler (reviewed on this blog) a cracking account of how a small-time thug swindled one of the biggest newspapers in Germany by selling them Hitler’s forged diaries. An Officer and A Spy is a historical novel of the Drefus Affair in France at the turn of the last century. The novel, written from the point of view of Georges Picquart, the army officer who risked his career to prove Drefus’s innocence, is superb. I therefore read another of Harris’s novel, The Conclave. Not as riveting as An Officer and A Spy, but, still, very readable.

I read SS-GB, the masterpiece of Len Deighton (a very favourite writer of my father) after I watched the BBC drama. I did not really understand it, not only because the plot was more convoluted than my intestines but also because all the actors mumbled. I like convoluted plots. When I read them, they make me feel intelligent. And plots don’t get more convoluted than Deighton’s alternative history of the Second World War. A smashing read.

Orange are not the Only Fruit is the autobiographical debut novel of the British writer Jannette Winterson. It is a coming of age story of a girl, raised by a religious-nutcase adoptive mother, who discovers her sexuality (the girl, that is, not the mother). The novel progresses at two levels. The first (far more accessible and crackling with dry wit) is the story of Jannette (Winterson gives the protagonist of this ‘fiction’ her own name); the second is a fable. Quite what the relations of the fable is to the life of Jannette (the fictional protagonist) was not clear to me. The novel is narrated in a style that keeps the emotions at arm’s length. I don’t know whether this is Winterson’s prose-style in general (I have not read her other novels) or whether she adopted this style specifically for this novel.

I read My Brilliant Friend, the first of the Italian author Elena Ferrante’s four-volume Neapolitan novels, because it was chosen by the book club of which I am a member. The book was not appreciated by the book club, the main criticism being the supporting characters in the novel lacked individuality.  I don’t know about that. What I do know that I loved the novel. It is the story about two girls from a working-class suburb of Naples, their friendship and rivalry and aspirations. This is an expansive novel, with a large cast of characters, told in a luxuriant prose (full marks to the translator, too). I was so immersed in the novel, Scarlet Johansson could have walked into the room in the altogether and I wouldn’t have looked up. I vowed to read the other three volumes. Instead I read Days of Abandonment, Ferrante’s debut novel. It is an extraordinary novel of the disintegration of a marriage. The novel is almost too painful to read in part.

Albert Camus’s The Outsider (The Stranger, in some English translations) starts with the famous line (apparently translated differently in different translations): ‘[My] mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know’. It sets the tone of the rest of this short novel. Camus, as has been pointed out in many learned reviews of the novel, explores many philosophical strands in the novel, such as absurdism or existentialism. The protagonist of Camus’s novel is a profoundly bored, uninterested and apathetic man, who, as he himself observes towards the end of the novel, is condemned because he is not able to react to situations in a manner that is deemed to be socially appropriate.

Xiaolu Guo was chosen by Granta as one of the best British young novelists, in 2013. Guo, who grew up in China learnt English as an adult. UFO in Her Eyes is a gentle satire, and the theme is alienation. It is a well-crafted, easily accessible novel suffused with mild humour.  

Finally, I re-read a few novels last year, which re-affirmed my original impressions. Amsterdam: disappointing; The Prime of Ms Jean Brodie: superb; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: entertaining, if slightly dated. 

This is the third or fourth year in a row in which I did not manage to read an average of one book per week. Oh well. Below are my top ten novels of 2017:

1.       Days of Abandonment

2.       The Prime of Miss Jean Broadie

3.       An Officer and A Spy

4.       My Brilliant Friend

5.       Em and the Big Hoom

6.       Ragtime

7.       SS-GB

8.       The Outsider

9.       Epitaph for A Spy

10.   One flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest