About my reading in 2010

At the start of the New Year I like to reflect on the books I read during the previous year.

My biggest reading achievement last year was to get to the end of Proust’s “A la recherche du temps perdu”, completing the 2000 pages of the remaining 5 volumes “le Côté de Guermantes”; “Sodome et Gomorrhe”, “la Prisonnière”, “Albertine disparue” and “le Temps retrouvé”. See “About Proust” (September 2010). Proust is not an easy read, but in the end definitely worth it.

My other big project was to reread Thomas Hardy. I had started with “the Mayor of Casterbridge” in 2009 and in 2010 I went on to read all of his other major novels: (the first four of these being new to me) “the Trumpet Major”, “Under the Greenwood tree”, “A pair of blue eyes”, “ the Wellbeloved”; (and re-reading) “Far from the Madding Crowd”, ”the Return of the Native”, “Jude the Obscure”, “the Woodlanders” “Tess of the d'Urbervilles”; and also the volume of short stories “Life's little ironies” and some of the poems. See “About Thomas Hardy” (January 2011). Hardy is undoubtedly one of the greatest novelists in any language.

Last year some of my favourite contemporary authors in English had new novels out, which I can recommend, if you like these writers’ work.

“Last night in Twisted River” is a good John Irving family saga with his favourite usual ingredients of growing up in 1950’s New England, bizarre twists of fate and comic sexual scenes.

Ian McEwan’s “Solar” is also in comic vein, and even if not one of his best novels certainly an entertaining read, especially in the Arctic adventure of its hapless anti-hero, Beard, a philandering Nobel-winning scientist cruising on his past reputation and heading for his come-uppance.

Jonathan Coe’s “Terrible privacy of Maxwell Sim” is another comic novel with an anti-hero as its central character. Coe uses the narrative technique of gradually revealing, through other people's accounts which Maxwell Sim discovers, the formative events that have shaped him, and made him the terribly lonely man he is. More generally Coe describes the kind of dysfunctional relationships between ostensibly close people which have always existed but have recently worsened in our modern society due to its growing obsession with electronic rather than human contact.

My next three novels read in English are modern and foreign.

Adiga’s “the White Tiger” is a funny and easy to read sort of literary equivalent to the film “Slumdog Millionaire” about how to survive desperate poverty in modern India.

Larsson’s “Girl who kicked the hornet's nest” is the third thriller in his “Millenium Trilogy” about the extraordinary Lisbeth, victim of society and computer hacker, set in present day Sweden. It certainly keeps you turning the pages, but I have to say that I found book 2 less convincing than book 1, and book 3 less than book 2. For me there’s more to a good book than this.

Pamuk’s “My name is Red” is a novel I know a lot of readers have found difficult, which I find surprising as it does have a simple linear chronology and though the point of view changes constantly it is always clearly indicated. It has the structure of a “whodunnit” as well, but its exotic historic setting in 16th century Istanbul and the reflective passages in it on the nature of art and the difference between East and West may well delay the plot too much for some. I myself found it quite original and satisfying.

Under the heading of classics in English I read Hawthorne’s “Scarlet letter”, which is an efficient telling of a good story on the familiar theme of how true feminine virtue wins out over the hypocrisy of society.

My two new Shakespeare plays last year, read before seeing them for the first time, were “Measure for measure” and “King John”, both unjustly neglected and with some fine scenes which are among the Bard’s best.

I move on to my foreign language reading: my French was amply served by Proust; my German came off rather poorly with an unsuccessful stab at Nietzsche’s “Also sprach Zarathustra”, without doubt one of the hardest texts I’ve ever tried; while my Italian stretched to two novels recommended by Clara; and my Spanish ran to no less than four novels.

Giordano’s “la Solitudine dei numeri primi” (“The Solitude of Prime Numbers”) is a European best seller about a young man and a woman in present day Italy who both have their own terrible traumatic pasts and who ought to be close to each other yet sadly remain alone.

Mazzantini’s “Venuto al mondo” (as yet untranslated) is quite a complex novel (not always well written, but involving) about one woman’s struggle to have a child even if she has to adopt one, the horrors of civil war in Bosnia and the life force that can overcome them.

The Mexican writer Rulfo’s “Pedro Paramo” (1955) is regarded as a classic of modern Spanish fiction, but I couldn’t really get into it, what with it’s unclear delineation between the real and the hallucinatory (the living and the dead in a ghost town) and its lack of any real story worth telling.

Then the more recent Mexican Laura Esquivel’s “Malinche” did have a potentially interesting story to tell, that of the life of the native woman who acted as Cortez the conquistador’s interpreter and therefore betrayer of her people, but I was seriously disappointed and felt a great opportunity had been missed.

Ruiz Zafon’s international bestseller, “la Sombra del viento” (“Shadow of the wind”) is a thriller set in the unlikely world of second-hand booksellers in Barcelona at the time of Franco. It is a really beautifully written book telling a great story with some good psychology in the characterization and it deserves its success.

His follow-up prequel, “el Juego del angel” (“the Angel’s game”), I still found enjoyable but less credible.

So as you can see, my reading in 2010 was dominated by novels even more than usual with them totalling 27 out of 34 completed books.

In the unduly negelected area of non-fiction, let me then mention two good books by Alain De Botton which I referred to in my entries to this blog last year: “the Pleasures and sorrows of work”, see “About work” (October 2010); and “the Consolations of philosophy”, see “About philosophy” (November 2010). De Botton writes an enjoyable book, which he likes to illustrate wittily, he has a direct and humorous style. He is careful to relate the points he makes to everyday experience and he never fails to be thought provoking.

While on my trip to Turkey last autumn I read an autobiography published in English in London in the 1950’s by an exile, Irfan Orga, “Portrait of a Turkish family” which was truly fascinating.

Lastly, in the area of economics, Skidelsky’s “Keynes: the return of the master”, confirmed my respect for one of the greatest original thinkers of the last century (maybe I’ll get round to the “General theory” this year).

So quite a few books there, but this year it’s perhaps time to read something other than novels !