2013 Reading Review — debacles and farragos and cock-ups

I read fewer books this year than usual; we had a logistically complicated move back to the States after two years in Munich, followed by the need to refurnish our home in Seattle from scratch. Nevertheless, I got some good reading in because otherwise I’d have to jump off a bridge.

I’ve written about some of my favorite novels from this year already (links are to my reviews for these):

Light – M. John Harrison
Turtle Diary – Russell Hoban
The Player of Games – Iain M. Banks
The Goshawk – T.H. White
Blindsight – Peter Watts
Leviathan Wakes – James S.A. Corey

And here are a few other (non-SF) novels I especially liked:

Unconditional Surrender, by Evelyn Waugh — this is the last book in Waugh’s “Sword of Honour” trilogy (I read the first two books at the end of 2012). I’d tried Waugh before, but couldn’t finish Brideshead Revisited; it was just too obnoxious. But his World War II trilogy is richly satisfying, without the painfully arch tone of Brideshead — or of Decline and Fall, which I read later in the year. Waugh follows the passive, depressive Guy Crouchback through debacles and farragos and cock-ups, then expands his view to take in a whole assortment of deftly drawn characters going about their bizarre wartime business. Great stuff.

The Pickwick Papers and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, by Charles Dickens — I’m not as big of a Dickens fan as some folks, e.g. my mom, who has read all of his books several times over. But both of these were great and I think this Dickens kid may have a bright future if he keeps it up. Pickwick has a great larkish feel to it, while Drood has a wonderfully obsessive atmosphere. Edwin Drood’s uncle John Jasper is a superb portrait of darkly obsessive, inappropriate, unrequited love; and I would’ve happily read a much longer novel just about the young retired sailor Mr. Tartar with his pleasant disposition and tidy lodgings. Really the phrase “pleasant disposition and tidy lodgings” perfectly describes the sort of rocket-fueled, tension-sprung engine that could drive any novel.

Anna of the Five Towns, by Arnold Bennett — speaking of tension, this 1902 novel was one of my most suspenseful reads of the year. Good old Victorian craftsmanship at its most heartbreaking, it tells the story of Anna Tellwright’s navigation amid the demands of her station in life and her miserly father. Definitely a read that snuck up on me — I really wasn’t expecting the narrative power Bennett brings to bear on what feels like it would have been a common scenario in industrially expanding Victorian England.

Also, my favorite non-fiction reads of the year:

Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence, by Geoff Dyer — this was a re-read of one of my all-time favorites. Dyer procrastinates and prevaricates as his intention to write a scholarly study of D.H. Lawrence is undermined by his own fecklessness and endlessly charming self-loathing. The opening lines dive right in:

Looking back it seems, on the one hand, hard to believe that I could have wasted so much time, could have exhausted myself so utterly, wondering when I was going to begin my study of D.H. Lawrence; on the other, it seems equally hard to believe that I ever started it, for the prospect of embarking on this study of Lawrence accelerated and intensified the psychological disarray it was meant to delay and alleviate. Conceived as a distraction, it immediately took on the distracted character of that from which it was intended to be a distraction, namely myself. If, I said to myself, if I can apply myself to a sober — I can remember saying that word ‘sober’ to myself, over and over, until it acquired a hysterical, near-demented ring — if I can apply myself to a sober, academic study of D.H. Lawrence then that will force me to pull myself together.

Dyer spends more time on his own travels and neuroses than he does on Lawrence, yet somehow manages to illuminate something essential in Lawrence’s difficult, mercurial identity as well.

Fun coincidence here: While we were living in Munich I read a New York Times article by Dyer that mentioned in passing an Atkinson Grimshaw exhibition at London’s Guildhall Museum; it was mentioned in the context of the use of Grimshaw’s paintings on Penguin Classics covers, including The Mystery of Edwin Drood (“To reread any of them with different cover art is inconceivable: ‘Edwin Drood’ is Grimshaw’s painting.” — see above for the image). I had always loved Penguin covers using Grimshaw’s art, and I never pass up an excuse to go to London, so my son and I made a quick jaunt over to visit my dad (who was living out near Greenwich at the time for a consulting job). The exhibition was well worth the trip — thanks Dyer and Grimshaw!

A Reader’s Book of Days, by Tom Nissley — I wrote about this earlier, it’s crammed with good stuff. Reading it through, rather than just browsing by day, it starts to feel like a bizarrely skewed yet consummate history of world literature.

Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas, by Matthew Hollis — Thomas has always been one of my favorite poets. I think like a lot of his fans, I felt like he was a secret discovery back when I first came upon “Adlestrop” and “Rain” (in my Norton’s Anthology of English Literature, back in college). He was actually more well-known and influential than I realized at the time, though; and in the twenty years since then his renown has only grown. Hollis does an excellent job of exploring his influence on other writers, in addition to his life and untimely death in World War I. I also ordered a Penguin selection of his poems and prose — I already had his collected poems in a Faber edition but it was great to dig into some of the fine journalism and travel writing he resented as so much hackwork.

Arabian Sands, by Wilfred Thesiger — Thesiger was one of the last Westerners to explore the Arabian peninsula’s murkier reaches before oil money poured in to develop, and corrupt, the region. His exploits are harrowing but he always presents them in an off-hand, understated style. This reminded me quite a bit of Fitzroy Maclean’s equally excellent memoir Eastern Approaches — British explorers and soldiers in the post-Burton mold, making their last crazy-brave forays into the world’s darkest, most dangerous corners as their empire collapses around them.

All in all a good reading year — looking forward to 2014.

Nissley’s Book of Days

On Monday night my buddy Tom Nissley, who’s been travelling the US to promote his book A Reader’s Book of Days, hosted a round of “Literary Jeopardy” in NYC. He did a little of this at his launch party at The Elliott Bay Book Co. here in Seattle, where I won a copy of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s essay collection Pulphead (which I haven’t had a chance to dip into yet).

There’s a great write-up of Monday’s event on The New Yorker’s books blog — I wish I could’ve been there for the “Wolf Wolfe Wolff Woolf” shenanigans. And the book is great, by the way: packed with both factual and fictional minutiae for every day of the year, it’s poignant, funny, and surprising. April 19, for example, which is the date of birth for one of my favorite writers, Richard Hughes (A High Wind in Jamaica) and date of death for both Lord Byron and one of my favorite all-round folks of all time, Charles Darwin, starts off with the following two entries:

1854 Henry David Thoreau declined a neighbor’s offer of a two-headed calf: “I am not interested in mere phenomena.” [Note: Joanna Neborsky’s illustration of the calf in question is pretty adorable.]

1862 Lionel Tennyson, age eight, explained to a visitor to the household, Lewis Carroll, the conditions under which he would show Carroll some poems he had written: Carroll must play chess with him, and must allow Lionel to give him “one blow on the head with a mallet.”

Just the index alone is worth the price — the entry for “animals,” for example, works its way from badgers to yeti.

Also check out Tom’s blog The Ephemeral Firmament; the guy can find the heartbreaking undercurrents in just about anything.