A year of reading slowly
A brief trot through some of the miniscule pile of books I read in 2023
As I write this, December is fading but not quite over. It is still possible that I’ll finish the novel I’ve been reading since October before the year is out. Even so, I will have read fewer than 30 books in 2023, which is my lowest annual total since 2006, the year my PhD got shelved and my sanity was hanging by a thread.
You can’t be a writer without reading. OK, you can but not a halfway decent one. Also, I really like reading and I have a pile of books and a cache of ebooks that I’ve bought or been given and would like to read. It’s just that this year I don’t seem to have been able to do that.
The day-job has been horrendous: lovely colleagues but a failing project, new processes, ridiculous stress, and having to increase my hours for 5 months. On top of that, as I’ve mentioned before, we were supposed to move house. Most of my downtime this year seems to have been taken up with studying rightmove, having people look round our flat or walking miles to look round other people’s houses, filling in forms, talking to the solicitor, clearing cupboards and carrying unwanted items to charity shops. Then packing boxes, and unpacking them again when it all fell through at the last minute.
You would think that I’d have been settling down with a good book at the end of yet another stressful day, but apparently not. Substack might have been partly to blame towards the end of the year: reading an article that informs or entertains on its own is easier than reading a chapter of a novel you’ve been reading so long you can’t remember how it began.
Nevertheless, I have read a few books: half as ebooks (Kobo or from the library via BorrowBox); more than two-thirds fiction but only about a third of that fiction was SFF and half of it was crime. The non-fiction split more or less down the middle into history, and farming/sheep. What can I say? It’s been an odd year.
I started the year by finishing the Broken Earth trilogy by NK Jemisin: The Obelisk Gate and The Stone Sky. I’d already read The Fifth Season at the end of 2022, about which I said in last year’s reading round-up “good grief it's good. It's about the end of the world, but beyond that there's not much to say without spoilers. I loved the conversational narrative voice, the fact that one strand is written in second person, the way the world feels whole and different (like Dune or similar). Just read it if you like epic fantasy, you'll thank me later.” The same goes for the whole trilogy really. I think I cried at the end of books 1 and 3 but I loved it. It’s vast and unusual and has such cultural weight - it’s one of those fantasy epics where there are quotes from that world’s history books or recovered documents from thousands of years in the past, so you can believe it as a place of legends and myths and traditions.
Next came The Dying Day by Vaseem Khan, book 2 in his Malabar House series set in Bombay in 1950. I also read book 3, The Lost Man of Bombay, later in the year. I enjoy his style, readable and wryly amusing, and I like his protagonist who is the only female detective in the Indian police. They’re very much cosy crime, puzzles in the style of Golden Age novels, but with a layer of the politics of post-partition India that gives them some bite. If you think you might enjoy his books I can recommend signing up to his newsletter, you get occasional short stories featuring his series characters, as well as extracts from forthcoming books and general chat about what he’s been up to, and books he’s enjoyed lately.
The Lost Future of Pepperharrow by Natasha Pulley is the follow-up to The Watchmaker of Filigree Street which I reviewed when I read it in 2017, and it felt right, like it was the ending that fit. Even now, months after I finished it, the memory of this novel tugs at my heart. It’s brimming with beautiful melancholy, tenderness, love, joy, sadness, hope and heartbreak, mostly set in Japan around the turn of the 20th century. If you enjoyed The Watchmaker… you will love this. And if you haven’t read the earlier novel you won’t appreciate it so go back and catch up first.
In March I wrote about my shock appreciation of Jeremy Clarkson’s book Diddly Squat: A Year on the Farm, and I stand by my endorsement of it as the start of a conversation among people who wouldn’t ordinarily think about the environment or sustainable food production. As I said then, “At one time I imagined I would grow up to work or live on a farm and I retain a more than passing interest in sheep, northern hill-farming, and related matters”, which explains why I also read a couple of other farm-related books. One of them was A Shepherd’s Life by WH Hudson, a 1910 book of anecdotes told to the author by a Wiltshire shepherd. It catalogues a former age and the way things were done in the nineteenth century and is all very interesting, but it strikes me that there is nothing comparable for the northern counties pre-WW1, and they are the places I’m interested in and familiar with. If anyone knows of ones I may have overlooked, let me know.
I read a few random books, ones that caught my eye when I was casting about the Kobo website or on the BorrowBox list, or scanning the week’s reviews in The Guardian - at some point I signed up for the weekly email that gives you a round-up of book-related content.
The Rebound by Catherine Walsh was a romantic comedy set in Ireland that properly made me laugh out loud and I zipped through it. It features both girl meets boy and (different) girl meets girl. Cheesy bits, cosy bits, lots of funny bits, small town vibes.
The Stranger Times by CK McDonnell is a sort of dark comic fantasy mystery set in Manchester. The Stranger Times is a hopeless newspaper of the weird and unexplained, but when some of the weirdness is close to home they remember the phrase ‘investigative journalism’. If you like early (pre-steampunk) Robert Rankin, or Ben Aaronovitch you’ll probably enjoy this and it is the start of a series.
I’m Sorry You Feel That Way by Rebecca Wait was not the sort of thing I normally go for, but I enjoyed it. This one was from a Guardian review and I guess might class as literary fiction. Middle class family somewhere down south is reluctantly reunited for a funeral and there are rifts between the grown-up siblings and their parents. Good portrayal of family dynamics and the effects of mental illness on a family; we go back to the parents’ generation as well.
The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman is the second in his astonishingly popular Thursday Murder Club series about a group of friends in a retirement village who solve crime. I quite enjoyed the first one but this follow-up took the story in a direction that didn’t interest me, with ancillary protagonists I didn’t care about, and that made me care less about the main characters too. It’s hard to explain without spoilers, but there are friends in high places and it changed the nature of it from a group of interesting old folks using experience, insight and patience to solve a puzzle, to something a bit more run of the mill. Well-plotted though, I thought, and my friend who wasn’t bothered by the changed nature exhibited here absolutely loved it and has loved the subsequent volumes too. It has reminded me that I meant to read The Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood (the Death in Paradise author) and haven’t yet. It’s another cosy crime novel that starts a series, and features an old lady amateur sleuth and her friends.
Burglars Can’t Be Choosers by Lawrence Block is a 1970s New York crime novel, the first in the Bernie Rhodenbarr series. Bernie is a laid-back and affable chap who happens to be a burglar, and when he stumbles across a murder he has to solve it in order to escape the rap himself. Enjoyable enough but very of its time. And you have to be able to suspend moral judgement and root for a criminal while you’re reading it. I also re-read a Stephen Dobyns novel at random from my shelves: Saratoga Snapper, featuring private detective Charlie Bradshaw, set in the early 1980s in New York State. It was nice to revisit Saratoga Springs, and it had weathered the years better than Burglars Can’t Be Choosers, I think - though Charlie’s friend Vic would probably get on well with Bernie Rhodenbarr.
I also read, less randomly, another couple of Charles Paris novels by Simon Brett. If you’re not fortunate enough to have come across the excellent BBC Radio 4 adaptations by Jeremy Front, starring Bill Nighy as Charles, do check them out. Charles Paris is an actor who’s usually scrabbling around for the next job, which might be a stint in panto, a voiceover for an advert, or a small part in an experimental theatre project. He has a ‘semi-detached’ wife, Frances - they’re not actually divorced I think, but they rarely live under the same roof, and certainly not if Frances can help it. Someone connected to the new job will die, probably looking like an accident but Charles doesn’t believe that and goes poking around. I’ve read a few of the novels now and they’re often quite different from the adaptations, which is interesting in itself, but are enjoyable cosy crimes with interesting characters.
My dad recommended a few Joseph Conrad novels a couple of years ago. I loved The Secret Agent, couldn’t get on with Under Western Eyes, and eventually got round to trying his 1904 novel Nostromo. To begin with, I couldn’t get on with that either. I read the first ten pages or so and it wasn’t grabbing me, I had to keep re-reading sections and I put it aside. If it hadn’t been recommended by my dad, that would have been that, but I remembered how much I’d enjoyed The Secret Agent and I gave it another go this year. I absolutely loved it. It was like the sort of adventure story I read as a kid, set in a fictional South American republic in the nineteenth century, a place of revolution, intrigue, and silver-mining. Nostromo is an Italian sailor who has become the trustworthy head of the dock workers in the port city, and the story is about a stolen cargo of silver. I got caught up in the hopes and fears of the town and felt like I knew the characters by the end of it.
I will briefly recommend The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho by popular British actor Paterson Joseph; the time it’s taken me to read this novel set mainly in 18th century London is no reflection on its quality [Late note: I did finish reading it by the end of the year]. Worth checking out if you’d like a different perspective on Georgian London; Sancho was the first black man to vote in England, and Joseph first wrote a play about him in 2015.
The historical end of the year’s non-fiction included 2 books that made me angry: Black Gold by Jeremy Paxman and a slim book(let), The Chartist Risings in Bradford by DG Wright, which I won’t go into detail on as it’s obviously going to be of most interest to those from, or with ancestors from, Bradford in West Yorkshire. Black Gold is a history of coal-mining in Britain, and I was crying before I’d finished reading the Introduction; Paxman seemed to weave every major mining disaster into the book and go hard on the heart-twanging detail. Given that I’m from several long lines of coal miners from the late eighteenth century to the 1950s, it’s amazing I’m even here. Paxman is not by any means left-wing and didn’t have much time for the more overtly socialist union leaders, but he didn’t seem impressed by the ultra-capitalist hard-hearted mine-owners either, which made it feel like it was probably reasonably even-handed. Very readable, interesting and full of detail.
Never Had It So Good by Dominic Sandbrook was surprisingly readable too, despite its enormous size and only covering a 7-year period. I had seen one of his TV documentaries years ago and pegged him as a Thatcherite so I did expect this to have a moderately right-wing slant. He clearly despises Tony Benn and seemed to be on a weird mission to humanise the memory of Enoch Powell, but that aside it was an enjoyable delve into social history set into detailed context. I believe there is a second volume covering the rest of the 1960s but I have another enormous history book covering a short period (Austerity Britain 1945-51 by David Kynaston) courtesy of my dad to get through first.
If you have views on the books I read in 2023 (you know you do), or would like to recommend your own favourites from the year, chip in down in the comments. Here’s to a better reading year for us all in 2024.