It has become an end of the year ritual to recall the year’s experience of reading. Although I have stopped setting reading targets or challenges, I do very little else, beyond reading. So depending on travel plans (my other interest), I usually average 60 books in a year. And keep a meticulous l It ist, for I can no longer retain all the names in my head.
How do I select what I read? In earlier years it was fairly random, and included browsing in book stores (and we had large, well stocked ones!), the long list of the Booker Prize and other prizes, book reviews in The Hindu and other publications. More recently, I keep track of new publications by following the reviews of new releases in ‘The Guardian’, ‘New Yorker’ (available free online) and listening to the the wonderful book podcasts from ‘The Guardian’ ‘The New Yorker’ “New York Times’. I read ‘Times Literary Supplement’ ‘London Review of books’ and ‘Biblio’ regularly. The selected finalists for the ever increasing number of Indian book prizes give you a glimpse into Indian writing. And of course, when a favorite author’s book is released it quickly goes onto my TBR! It is heartening, how quickly the books reach us, a far cry from earlier times!
So from the list of 64 (plus a couple since I scanned these pages) books I have read this year, here are my inputs. Fiction is predominant, as in spite of my desire and frequent resolutions to read more non-fiction, i do end up reading more fiction!
Colson Whithead’s Nickel boys is a beautiful, well written and heart wrenching story of the life of boys in a reform school. The author won the the Pulitzer prize in 2017 and National Book Award in 2016 for his earlier book ‘The underground railroad’. The reform school in the book, is a fictionalized version of the Dozier school for boys which opened in 1900 and closed in 2011. The state of Florida ran Dozier as a reform school and allegations against the school for allowing the beatings, rapes, torture, and even murder of students by guards and employees came out. Investigations into the allegations revealed substantial proof and some 55 graves were discovered on school grounds. Colson traces with empathy and suppressed anger, the trajectory of two of the boys, one who is aspirational and smart but end up where he does, by pure accident. Makes you think of the many turns in your life which are accidental!
Ray Bradbury’s Faranheit 451, an iconic book published in 1953, makes it to most of the top 100 books of the 20th century American fiction. I was re-reading it after many years, and while it was dystopian in its time, it is so close to our present times that it was disconcerting. The literal burning of books (451F being the temperature at which books burn, or so Bradbury was told), is totally unnecessary in the world of today, a switch of the button to disconnect the internet can do even more! As for physical libraries, they too seem to be often under threat as recent events have shown.
Margaret Atwood is among my all time favorite writers, for her style, lucidity and moral compass. Her ‘The Testament’ was so avidly awaited by readers, and the expectations from her so high, that it was on the Booker long list before it was published. The story was the continuation of her imagined world of Gilead, created in Handmaid’s Tale, a world that had permeated in population through a successful television series of the same name. I bought ‘The testament’ and then decided to pull out the older book and re-read it. It did not disappoint, but made me tardy about reading new book, in case it did!! Of course, I will get around to it in the New Year.
Books by the the Irish writers Sebastian Barry and Colm Toibin were among the best I read this year. Barry’s books, On Canaan’s side and Temporary gentlemen, in different ways address the issues of the Irish freedom struggle in the early decades of the 20th century and the impact of the First War on the life of the Irish people. They convey the tensions between the two communities (Catholic and Protestant) in poetic and lyrical prose. While I was vaguely familiar with the broad outlines of Irish history, the similarities of the Irish independence struggle with our own, maybe why they struck a special cord. Colm Toibin’s The testament of Mary is a short wonderful book about the last days of Christ. The Mary in the title is the mother of Jesus, and this is one of the most poignant books I have read about maternal love.
The American writer Marillyne Robinson, is widely acclaimed and awarded. I had read her 1984 novel, Housekeeping sometime ago. It was on many of the “books of the century” lists and also on the list I was trying to plough through, of great American writers of the last century. She wrote with love and sensitivity of the vast American outback, in this case Idaho. Her book Gilead was published 2 decades later and was widely acclaimed. But I had kept away from it, because I got the impression that it was a ‘religious’ book! However, I did take the plunge and enjoyed it immensely. Its a book about a pair of friends, both preachers. Christianity does come into it, but its far more than that. It is essentially about ‘faith’ and family ties told in a lovely, simple yet powerful style. It raises many universal questions. Its not an easy book to get through but worth the effort. So much so, that I also read her next book Home.
Sebastian Faulks, is an English writer, best known for his French triology. I had previously read the Birdsong (1993), the best known of these. This year I read the earlier book in the triology, The Girl at the Lion d’Or (1989) as well as A fool’s alphabet (1992), On Green Dolphin Street (2001) and Human traces (2005). Many of the stories have links to France and WWI and he tells them with wonderful empathy for the characters that he creates. There is something warm and likeable about them.
This was also the year that I finally read that iconic masterpiece of English literature, Middlemarch by George Eliot. Its a thick book, and its slow beginning, describing middle level British aristrocatic country life, was not appealing to me on my earlier attempts. However, the book was on my TBR shelf for a while, and finally I did persist. This was probably inspired by the emerging discussions on women writers, especially in the context of the post-MeToo ecosystem. George Eliot, who lived through the middle part of the 19th century was actually Mary Ann Evans. Middlemarch reveals much about her, as she weaves out the character of the spunky heroine Dorothea. I have just started reading her ‘Adam Bede’ and would probably venture onto others as well.
I do plan to widen my non-fiction reading and I have a host of them on my TBR shelf. However, among those I read, some were outstanding. Educated by Tara Westover has been widely raved about and I got to read it when it was picked by the Book Club, which I have joined. This is an autobiography, of growing up in a Mormon family with extreme beliefs. Born sometime in September, 1986 on a remote mountain in Idaho, Westover was the seventh child of Mormon parents who subscribed to a paranoid patchwork of beliefs which went well beyond the mandates of their religion. Westover’s mother worked as a midwife and a herbal healer. Her father claimed to have prophetic powers, and owned a scrap yard where his children labored without any protective equipment. (Westover recounts accidents so hideous, and so frequent, that it’s a wonder she lived to tell her tale at all.) Mainstream medicine and schools were not trusted, and Westover’s determination to leave home and get a formal education was seen as a rebellion against her parents’ world. Westover tells her story with tremendous perceptiveness and unsparing clarity, as well as with curiosity and love.
There were many books on the list that were ‘good but and then there were the disappointments. Pico Iyer has been a favorite for a long time, especially his travel books. But his latest release Autumn lights disappointed on many counts. He writes on Buddhism, Dalai Lama, stillness but in this book it was stillness carried too far. I could get where he was coming from, but I felt that he failed to convey the benefits of a still and minimalistic life in words! I am sure he enjoys living it and I do envy him that. But it did not come through to me in the book. Amitava Ghosh’s Gun Island was the other great disappointment. I have been a huge fan, have looked forward to each new book and consumed them with enthusiasm. Of course, the expectations from such prolific and competent writers are high and some of the disappointment is consequent to this. But even on its own, the story appeared contrived at many places and the characters never really came to life for me.
And as the year, and in fact the decade comes to an end, I look forward to more interesting adventures in reading in the coming years.
P.S. Links to some of my previous blogs on books
https://wordpress.com/post/sitanaiksblog.wordpress.com/114
There are books and books and then there is Coetzee!
My romance with historical fiction