‘I put it down as dawn was breaking the next day’
Books that I’ve loved this year
One huge negative arising from the wealth of online content is the shortening of our attention spans (alright my attention span). I find these days after a lifetime of reading books, that I now frequently can’t seem to get past any single page where my interest dips even slightly. This sets the bar absurdly high for any book, be it fact or fiction. So it’s a testament to the authors below that I have read and enjoyed (nearly) all of these this year.
Don’t worry about the ‘nearly’ we’ll come to that.
Here then are 10 books that have held me rapt this year, like days of yore. Some are old favourites and others are new, but all of them (bar one) have been so immersive I’ve managed to leave my phone in my pocket for whole minutes at a time. First though, a warning. In order to keep you on your toes they jump about a bit, topic-wise!
1) Bomber Len Deighton.
A long-standing favourite, this novel continues to blow me away every time I reread it. Telling the tale of a fictional air raid on Germany from multiple perspectives, I can’t think of a book that better highlights the horror, the terror, the dumb luck involved in warfare. It’s told through people whose existence you completely believe in and whose survival you are desperately rooting for, sometimes in vain.
A great page-turner it would be in my list all-time top 10 novels and near the top.
2) Unreliable Memoirs Clive James
A few months ago, I was horrified to realise that somehow my copy of Unreliable Memoirs had disappeared. It was the work of a moment to rectify that and it gave me an excuse to reread it when Amazon did its thing the next day.
I was quite cross when James’s public image became primarily about his TV work. I thought he was a much better writer than presenter, and what a great first book this is. It contains some of the funniest writing in the English language, while at the same time managing to be moving and beautiful.
Sitting here now I recall at least three episodes that make me laugh just thinking about them. If you haven’t read it for a while you are in for a treat.
3) The 100 Year Life Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott
Bearing in mind I’ve mentioned this book already in these pieces you won’t be surprised to see it in this list. This book had a seismic effect on me when I first read it a couple of years ago. It contains nothing less than a personal roadmap for the future for all of us, based around the undeniable fact that life expectancy for us, and even more so for our children is now pushing three figures.
It starts with the untenability of the current three stages (Learn, Earn, Do nothing) of our approach to life and proposes alternatives. Worth a read? It was powerful enough that it literally made me change my approach to retirement so I think so, yes!
4) Sweet Dreams Michael Frayn
Frayn likes to try and answer the big questions and in this delightful little novel he explores the biggest one of all.
Starting from an event that usually signifies the end of a life, he wonders what happens next and especially addresses that nagging question that’s as old as time ….
“If we are supposed to get an eternity in the afterlife isn’t it all going to get a bit… well… dull?”
The tale unwinds quickly. It’s hilariously funny and perceptive and mildly comforting. I can’t think a better way to spend an hour or two than immersing yourself in the liberal afterlife.
5) Japanese Maple and Prufrock
Off piste slightly for two poems about age and dying! I’m not a massive poetry fan (or an aging fan either for that matter) but these are two that deserve attention and I’ve read them again this year.
We are back with Clive James for Japanese Maple, from his small book of poems Sentenced to Life. When he knew he was dying in 2014 he didn’t want to start another novel, fearing that it may remain unfinished, instead he concentrated on poetry, including these magnificent short poems. Japanese Maple especially garnered worldwide praise.
Then on to Prufrock.
T.S. Eliot has become almost a cliché these days, appearing mainly on exam syllabuses, but he continues to have a big impact on this old schoolboy. The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock especially. The opening gives it to you straight between the eyes:
Let us go then you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Pow! So not just another moon/june poem eh!
It also contains possibly the saddest couplet I know:
I have heard the mermaids singing each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
Go on - pour yourself a stiff one and give it another read
6) Experience Martin Amis
I was considering writing a piece on the best memoirs of modern times, and I was trying to decide if this is the one was the winner, but then I reread it and decided that it was pointless to create a ranking system. There’s no way this or Unreliable Memoirs could be a runner-up.
Like his father, it seems that Martin Amis was a tricky character, but by gum he could turn a phrase.
The memoir is a firework display of images, memories and reflections. It is excellent on the impact of growing up in the long shadow cast by another great author, Kingsley. In addition, there’s a further unsettling theme running through it, created by the appalling fact that one of his cousins was a victim of Fred West in Gloucester. He tells Lucy Partington’s tale alongside his own, to devastating effect.
7) The Long Tail Chris Anderson
This book when it first came out encapsulated how our move into the digital age created enormous new markets and decimated others at a stroke. When the cost of production and storage moves close to zero there is no reason for firms not to hoover up the infinitesimal sales right at the far end of the demand curve.
In my own case it means that I am now deeply affronted by the fact for example that online vendors don’t have the latest album by The Bevis Frond. It feels like a deliberate decision, because there are no longer any stocking costs associated with it.
Its an interesting paradox though, that even now we still love a physical book or an LP. We’ve discovered that consuming the digital element alone does not give us quite the same frisson as turning a physical page or holding an album cover.
8) Going Infinite Michael Lewis
I finished this one last week. Michael Lewis tells tales of the modern world better than anybody, rendering comprehensible elements of life that are usually little more than gibberish to the rest of us when stumbled across in the papers.
This one is about Sam Bankman-Fried. He started a crypto currency exchange that in the space of a couple of years made him the wealthiest person under 30 in the world. Then overnight it fell down around his ears. And put him in gaol.
Lewis’s genius is to recognise that the story here is not how B-F did it and what the crypto exchange was, but more how such a decidedly strange person had such a huge impact. Obviously sitting on the autistic spectrum, his undoubted mathematical genius, when coupled with massive digital trading opportunities, made him uniquely dangerous. But it leaves open the question as to whether he actually intended to break any laws at all.
It’s compulsive reading.
9) I’m OK you’re OK Thomas Harris
This is a hell of a book if like me, you go through life being more than slightly perplexed by the behaviour of your fellow humans. It’s a great introduction to the world of the relationship approach called Transactional Analysis and when I was recommended it on a course a couple of decades ago (See last week’s article!) it gave me more “Oh, now I see!” moments than anything else I can remember.
I won’t go into TA too far here, but if you aren’t familiar I thoroughly recommend this book as a way in. It’s a kind of a toolkit for helping to deal with situations and people where you just can’t get on the same page.
10) Universal Economics Jerry L. Jordan
Cop out time…. I HAVEN’T READ THIS BOOK.
To explain. About 3 months ago I read an article somewhere that reviewed good books to use as an introduction to economics. This piqued my interest because economics was my topic at University and I used to enjoy the way that it tried to make sense of the world. Since The Dismal Science gets such a bum rap these days I thought it might be an idea to see what had changed over the last 40 years. This book was the article’s recommendation, so I pressed buy….
Bloody Hell. It is, let’s say, challenging. It’s a paperback and tipping the scales at over a kilo, it runs to 700+ pages of closely typed script. It’s interleaved with incomprehensible diagrams. I have opened it several times, but when I see for example, that the forward alone runs to 25 pages I close it again.
This is a true test of whether my concentration span has entirely gone.
I may report back. Or I may not…….