BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2014

Fanfare.....

Well, occasionally I do a "Book of the Month" when I read something I am especially impressed by, or I feel I need to raise the tone a bit, but here is a list of the books I most enjoyed during 2014


The Skull & The Nightingale  Michael Irwin

I think I wrote about this earlier in the year, I thought it was fab, very well done, even if I didn't like the end.

A rather different, gruesome book was Ian Banks' The Wasp Factory - but it was gruesome with a point, and I thought it was brilliant.

The Hare with Amber eyes by Edmund de Waal - which was the most brilliant account of wealthy, secular Jews in Paris and Vienna in the 19th-20thC - just utterly fascinating sort of history.

Andrey Kurzov's  Death and the Penguin and Penguin Lost were a brilliant pair of books, which gave immense insight into post-Soviet Ukraine/Russia/Chechnya - grim and funny in the best tradition.

Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union is the best detective book I've ever read, because the language is so fantastic and inventive and the plot is just ludicrous.  It's a new school of "ludicrous realism" if you like - or that sort of Ionesco like absurdism... except that it all ties together so beautifully.  It is one of those books that makes me feel "why do I bother?"

Other contenders (I didn't read too much dreck this year) include Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, Anne Patchett's State of Wonder,  William Falkener's As I lay dying,  Balzac's  The Black Sheep - and the even more fabulous Cousin Bette.   The Letters from Liselotte of course, which have had their own blog entry - Zola's  The Ladies' Paradise (although I prefer the French title Au Bonheur des Dames)  Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart which was a revelation.

I realise now that I have read virtually none of the contemporary "must read" books - I daresay I will in a few years' time.  The one major re-read this year was Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell which did not in the least disappoint on second reading... I still love it.

Charlie Hebdo

Today's news has really upset me.  I am pretty blase about terrorist attacks in general, it gets a bit same old, same old - in that they are quite similar and happen far away.   However, an attack on satire and political comment is something different.  Of course there are the tragedies of the individual deaths, but as a former (uncontroversial) journalist and someone who hopes to make a living from writing, the sense of threat to freedom to write as one wishes is more visceral than you might expect.  Of course it's not about ME - and yes, I know Charlie Hebdo was sailing close to the wind, and could occasionally ally itself to the right, but nevertheless, it's legitimate to criticise other cultural practices and beliefs isn't it?

There is a debate about Islamophobia - which I think is interesting, it gives Muslims special status - when really most of the anti-Islamic stuff is racial - white Muslims don't get it, unless they are misguided enough to wear a burqa. I suppose I shouldn't say "misguided" but I would point out that there is no injunction in the Koran to cover your head (unlike in the Bible, where Paul makes a bit of a thing of it).

And of course there is the endless problem that while Christians get it in the neck all the time, we cannot play the same games with Muslims.  I don't really know how much these things upset most people, it's hard to say.  Fetishising certain things within a faith is not usually very useful - it's "making an idol" of things.  Nevertheless I get upset when certain people post aggressively atheist things on FB, but usually because they aren't very accurate, or true.

There are a lot of tributes to the journos, and a lot of sabre-rattling - I particularly liked this cartoon, because it deals with the Muslim/Christian/freedom thing nicely.

"Oh no!.....Not them...."