Still Outside Authority

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