Some stuff I read in 2011
My favourites from this year's reading:
Driss Chraïbi, Une enquête au pays
I try, in an increasingly desultory fashion, to keep up with Moroccan literature just because I used to live there and people assume I Know Things about it. This one is pretty great, a kind of police procedural reimagined as a piece of political philosophy. No wait that makes it sounds terrible. Anyway, I reviewed it on LibraryThing here.
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
I bought this when I was working in South Africa but couldn't be arsed to read it till earlier this year. It's really very good, he's particularly strong on the ways in which apartheid made even black people think of themselves as second-class human beings. At one point Mandela is taking a flight in Ethiopia and he nearly gets off the aircraft when he sees the black pilot: ‘How can a black man fly a plane?’ What's also very striking is that Mandela was no Gandhi - he supported violent action against the regime, and in this book he defends civilian deaths caused by the ANC's militant wing (which he helped to set up). Very moving, very revealing. (Proper review here.)
Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia
A science fiction award-winner about Stalin's Russia which succeeds brilliantly in its plan to use comedy and humour as vehicles for huge ideas about society and repression. Loved this.
Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur
I finished this this year, having spent the last 18 months or so reading it on and off. A lot of my interest was linguistic - I love this stage of English, on the cusp between Middle and Modern. The prose is full of magic and craziness and conflicted knights and lubricious harlots and lots of confusing battles where people voyde their saddles and pull truncheons from their wounds. And so much beauty in the language. ‘In the grekynge of the daye Sir Tristram hente his hors wonders for to seke.’ Fuck yes.
Ovid, The Art of Love
Refreshingly even-handed in its treatment of sex. There is a certain amount of sniggering, but considering the state of European society for the subsequent two thousand years I thought his view of women and relationships was conspicuously modern and conspicuously pre-Christian, or, as Rebecca West would probably specify, pre-Augustinian. Famously, Ovid is pretty hot on the importance of making sure everyone involved gets their rocks off: ‘Sentiat ex imis venerem resoluta medullis / Femina, et ex aequo res iuvet illa duos.’ Which my existing 1929 translation renders cautiously as: ‘Let the woman feel love's act, unstrung to the very depths of her frame, and let that act delight both alike.’ My new James Michie translation is a bit more robust: ‘A fucked woman should melt to her core, and the pleasure / Be felt by both in equal measure.’
Fouad Laroui, La Femme la plus riche du Yorkshire
There are lots of good Moroccan authors, and lots of good books about Yorkshire. As far as I know this is the only intersection of the two sets.
Marguerite Yourcenar, Mémoires d'Hadrien
Amazing, amazing prose. My French is (still) not fluent, but even I was riveted by the perfection of some of the paragraphs. It's sad and beautiful and very wise, I want to read a lot more by Yourcenar.
Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor
It's what you expect from Nabokov: amazing writing, ludicrously convoluted vocabulary, and gratuitous paedophilia which he somehow, much to my annoyance, makes rather sexy. He just has a way of describing things in a totally new way - an erection, for instance: ‘The tall clock struck an anonymous quarter, and Ada was presently watching, cheek on fist, the impressive, though oddly morose, stirrings, steady clockwise launch, and ponderous upswing of virile revival.’ Well I mean you have to love that, don't you. I wrote a lot more about this one here.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
I find Freud is one of those thinkers whose ideas you dismiss when you first hear them - and then, two or three years later, you suddenly realise the bastard was probably right. There is something weirdly unscientific about this book, something a bit pre-modern in the dodgy methodology, but it's all very fascinating. I guess that's why Freud's remained crucial for modern writers and artists, whereas modern psychologists pretty much ignore him.
Caitlin Moran, How to be a Woman
Fucking amazing. I read this in a oner on the TGV back to Paris after covering the royal wedding in Monaco and although I was sleep-deprived I couldn't put it down, I just laughed continually for about four hours. And also, just finally someone is actually taking feminism seriously and not being po-faced about it. Caitlin is also the funniest person on Twitter, where in the space of twenty minutes she'll throw away a dozen lines which most writers would be proud to have saved up for a novel.
James Kelman, Kieron Smith, Boy
I thought this was outstanding. A child's rambling narrative of growing up in Glasgow, I can't help comparing it favourably with the clasics of the genre like Catcher in the Rye or the early chapters of Portrait of the Artist.
Christopher Hitchens, Arguably
Hitchens was almost unique in having so many fans who disagreed with him so often. We didn't love him for his opinons but for how he expressed them. He didn't create a huge number of new ideas or arguments, but he was undoubtedly a genius when it came to rhetoric, and his phrases have a cumulative power that makes them hit home like no one else's. Plus, watching religious apologists getting Hitchslapped is a massive YouTube pleasure of mine.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity
Like a lot of atheists, I am kind of obsessed with religious history and have been since I was tiny. I've read a lot of books like this, but none which do it so well.
Edward St Aubyn, Some Hope: A Trilogy
Wow, what a writer this is. Where did he come from? These books stand in a very Waugh-like English tradition of social commentary and sparkling witticisms, but it's all overlying some pretty dark stuff on child rape and addiction. The middle book, about heroin dependency, was so realistic I kept having to put the book down because I was breaking into cold sweats, and yet it was also somehow very funny.
Driss Chraïbi, Une enquête au pays
I try, in an increasingly desultory fashion, to keep up with Moroccan literature just because I used to live there and people assume I Know Things about it. This one is pretty great, a kind of police procedural reimagined as a piece of political philosophy. No wait that makes it sounds terrible. Anyway, I reviewed it on LibraryThing here.
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
I bought this when I was working in South Africa but couldn't be arsed to read it till earlier this year. It's really very good, he's particularly strong on the ways in which apartheid made even black people think of themselves as second-class human beings. At one point Mandela is taking a flight in Ethiopia and he nearly gets off the aircraft when he sees the black pilot: ‘How can a black man fly a plane?’ What's also very striking is that Mandela was no Gandhi - he supported violent action against the regime, and in this book he defends civilian deaths caused by the ANC's militant wing (which he helped to set up). Very moving, very revealing. (Proper review here.)
Adam Roberts, Yellow Blue Tibia
A science fiction award-winner about Stalin's Russia which succeeds brilliantly in its plan to use comedy and humour as vehicles for huge ideas about society and repression. Loved this.
Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur
I finished this this year, having spent the last 18 months or so reading it on and off. A lot of my interest was linguistic - I love this stage of English, on the cusp between Middle and Modern. The prose is full of magic and craziness and conflicted knights and lubricious harlots and lots of confusing battles where people voyde their saddles and pull truncheons from their wounds. And so much beauty in the language. ‘In the grekynge of the daye Sir Tristram hente his hors wonders for to seke.’ Fuck yes.
Ovid, The Art of Love
Refreshingly even-handed in its treatment of sex. There is a certain amount of sniggering, but considering the state of European society for the subsequent two thousand years I thought his view of women and relationships was conspicuously modern and conspicuously pre-Christian, or, as Rebecca West would probably specify, pre-Augustinian. Famously, Ovid is pretty hot on the importance of making sure everyone involved gets their rocks off: ‘Sentiat ex imis venerem resoluta medullis / Femina, et ex aequo res iuvet illa duos.’ Which my existing 1929 translation renders cautiously as: ‘Let the woman feel love's act, unstrung to the very depths of her frame, and let that act delight both alike.’ My new James Michie translation is a bit more robust: ‘A fucked woman should melt to her core, and the pleasure / Be felt by both in equal measure.’
Fouad Laroui, La Femme la plus riche du Yorkshire
There are lots of good Moroccan authors, and lots of good books about Yorkshire. As far as I know this is the only intersection of the two sets.
Marguerite Yourcenar, Mémoires d'Hadrien
Amazing, amazing prose. My French is (still) not fluent, but even I was riveted by the perfection of some of the paragraphs. It's sad and beautiful and very wise, I want to read a lot more by Yourcenar.
Vladimir Nabokov, Ada or Ardor
It's what you expect from Nabokov: amazing writing, ludicrously convoluted vocabulary, and gratuitous paedophilia which he somehow, much to my annoyance, makes rather sexy. He just has a way of describing things in a totally new way - an erection, for instance: ‘The tall clock struck an anonymous quarter, and Ada was presently watching, cheek on fist, the impressive, though oddly morose, stirrings, steady clockwise launch, and ponderous upswing of virile revival.’ Well I mean you have to love that, don't you. I wrote a lot more about this one here.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
I find Freud is one of those thinkers whose ideas you dismiss when you first hear them - and then, two or three years later, you suddenly realise the bastard was probably right. There is something weirdly unscientific about this book, something a bit pre-modern in the dodgy methodology, but it's all very fascinating. I guess that's why Freud's remained crucial for modern writers and artists, whereas modern psychologists pretty much ignore him.
Caitlin Moran, How to be a Woman
Fucking amazing. I read this in a oner on the TGV back to Paris after covering the royal wedding in Monaco and although I was sleep-deprived I couldn't put it down, I just laughed continually for about four hours. And also, just finally someone is actually taking feminism seriously and not being po-faced about it. Caitlin is also the funniest person on Twitter, where in the space of twenty minutes she'll throw away a dozen lines which most writers would be proud to have saved up for a novel.
James Kelman, Kieron Smith, Boy
I thought this was outstanding. A child's rambling narrative of growing up in Glasgow, I can't help comparing it favourably with the clasics of the genre like Catcher in the Rye or the early chapters of Portrait of the Artist.
Christopher Hitchens, Arguably
Hitchens was almost unique in having so many fans who disagreed with him so often. We didn't love him for his opinons but for how he expressed them. He didn't create a huge number of new ideas or arguments, but he was undoubtedly a genius when it came to rhetoric, and his phrases have a cumulative power that makes them hit home like no one else's. Plus, watching religious apologists getting Hitchslapped is a massive YouTube pleasure of mine.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity
Like a lot of atheists, I am kind of obsessed with religious history and have been since I was tiny. I've read a lot of books like this, but none which do it so well.
Edward St Aubyn, Some Hope: A Trilogy
Wow, what a writer this is. Where did he come from? These books stand in a very Waugh-like English tradition of social commentary and sparkling witticisms, but it's all overlying some pretty dark stuff on child rape and addiction. The middle book, about heroin dependency, was so realistic I kept having to put the book down because I was breaking into cold sweats, and yet it was also somehow very funny.