The books I read in 2019

    

      Recent hogmanays have seen me writing down a few of my reflections on the year past. My ruminations usually start as an attempt at rational discussion which - quite unconsciously on my part - segue into a rant. If I tried the same this year it would be one hundred per cent all rant so I've decided it will be much less wearing if I penned something innocuous - a list. Even so, I accept that lists themselves are not without contention.    
     Umberto Eco liked lists. So do I, but there any comparison of myself with the great Italian thinker and author ends  Here is a list of the books I’ve read in their entirety this year. If I make little comment on some it does not mean I didn’t like them. Indeed if I finish a book it means that I gained from it.

I have compiled this list because I think the readers of lists like then to consider what their list is or would be and how it would differ from those of others. Our lists are special to us. What follows is not a spectacular list but it's my list.

     The books are entered in the order I read them. My code for the list is F = fiction, NF = non-fiction which includes essays and academic studies and P = poetry.

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Winter   Ali Smith  (F)

Spring   Ali Smith. (F)

David Hockney cover eh? Must have cost a bit

These are the second and third books of a quartet. I read Autumn last year. Through Elizabeth, her principal character, Ali Smith gives us home truths about the referendum/Brexit world and how it really was and is. We await 'Summer.'

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Child of the Jago   Arthur Morrison  (F)

"There was a thickness in his voice and a wildness in his eye."

An enthralling novel of the 1890s about the poverty in working class life in the slums of the East End of London. Expect a tale violence and crime as well as scenes from family life.

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 Sisters Brothers   Patrick De Witt  (F)

A feral Lonesome Dove.

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Mrs Osmond   John Banville. (F)

John Banville does his impression of Henry James.

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A History of God   Karen Armstrong  (NF)

Karen Armstrong lucidly pursues the narrative of the strands of thought and beliefs that have brought us to the Gods we have now.   

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In search of Alan Gilzean The lost legacy of a Dundee and Spurs legend   David Morgan  (NF)

 

     This was a gift from my grandsons who know I am mad about Dundee Football Club. Gilzean, a native of Coupar Angus, was one of my heroes. I gulped this down.

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Dunbar   Edward St. Aubyn  (F)

     A well written modern re-run of King Lear. Inevitably the plot is predictable.

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Kudos   Rachel Cusk   (F)

The concluding part of an exceptional trilogy. The first two books were Outline and Transit.  Cusk is an original. In my view no one is writing about the human predicament, especially as women experience it, the way she does.

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In a House of Lies   Ian Rankin  (F)

As ever Rankin provides a thundering good read : insightful, suspenseful and exciting. Rebus is in a different role but still at heart himself.

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Murmur   Will Eaves  (F)

A fictional account of the life of Alan Turing : difficult but persuasive.

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Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence   James Lovelock  (NF) 

The celebrated centenarian scientist suggests we can use 
artificial intelligence (even if it supersedes our own). 

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Selected Poetry   Samuel Taylor Coleridge, compiled by, and with an introduction by Richard Holmes. (P)

 

All the great poems are here: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan and as well, as the surprise of Coleridge’s sonnets'

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A Weekend in New York   Benjamin Markovitz  (F)

  A fading professional tennis player deals with family matters in late August/early September when the US Open Tennis Championship is being played out in New York City.

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The Turn of the Screw   Henry James

Still as frightening as when I first read it. It stands up well to a re-read. He really likes long sentences.

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Coventry   Rachel Cusk  (NF)

A thoughtful collection of essays by a great novelist. I’m still thinking about the essays.

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Our Need for Others and its Roots in Infancy   Josephine Klein  (NF)

A wide ranging study about the basis, development and significance of early relationships , written more about human beings than John Bowlby's attachment theory, as profound as the latter may be.

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Theatres of the body - a psychoanalytical approach to psychosomatic illness   Joyce Macdougall  (NF)

     
     This book is what it says on the cover. It deals with outward symptoms caused by neurosis which in my view still rests at the core of psychoanalytic thinking,  but it is accessible to the general reader.

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Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe.  Edgar Allan Poe with an introduction by Will Self.

     These remain gripping gothic stories: 'The Purloined Letter' 'Murders in the Rue Morgue' together with impressive poems like 'The Raven.' I got interested in reading Poe again because I discovered he had for a short time attended a school near Clissold Park where our eldest daughter and her family live.

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Attention Seeking  Adam Phillips. (NF)

Psychoanalyst and celebrated essayist explores attention seeking and finds guilt and shame. Writing very much of today, still, the writing of Adam Phillips reminds me most of the work of the 17th century poet John Donne. Phillips's mode is metaphysical.

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The Diary of a Bookseller  Shaun Bythell  (NF)

The enchanting, humorous and moving journal of a Wigtown bookseller contains sadness and joy. A book that raises serious issues about the way publishing and bookselling are going but at the end of the day this is a couthie book. It’s my book of the year.

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Normal People   Sally Rooney  (F)

This is a rite of passage novel as Irish students make the transit from school in a small to middle-size Irish town to university life in Dublin. I am beginning to understand how different is student life today from my own over 50 years ago.

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Crudo   Olivia Laing. (F)  

You can see it was bought on the cheap, but that is not its nature

     This is a raw meat novel. It’s a short text and at times I struggled to understand it but I liked the author’s approach which was a kind of stream of consciousness which throws out many powerful images of life in 2017. 

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The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis   José Saramogo  (F) 

In my view folks should read anything they can of this great Portuguese author.

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The Greatness and Limitations of Freud’s Thought   Erich Fromm  (NF)

Fromm provides a readable and careful re-examination of Freud’s major theories.

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 Inequality What can be done?   Anthony B. Atkinson  (NF)

Following a comprehensive examination of how capitalism has bred extraordinary inequality, the late lamented and renowned academic Tony Atkinson suggests ways we can, as Joni Mitchell might sing, 'get back to the garden'.

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Michael Marra  Arrest This Moment   James Robertson (NF)

An imaginatively presented biography of Dundee’s bard.

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The Blue Suit   Richard Rayner   (NF)

I was given this book as a Christmas present. It is a memoir of a Yorkshire boy who gained a place at Cambridge University in the 1970s. I read it in two days. It is compelling reading but the confessions of criminal and shameful acts put me in touch with some of the shameful things I did as a student and still can’t admit.

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Down to the ground, down to the ground: more maturational angst

      In all human development different stages of life introduce characteristics that come to represent them. The infant’s desire for the breast, the child’s desire to be thought of as good by his or her parents, the teenager's search for identity and what seems to adults (with all too short memories) the adolescent’s over concern with personal appearance, and indeed, the demands of parenthood are just a few of the elements which influence life's vicissitudes. I might, and will now go on about another element: approaching elderliness. This is the staging post where I am currently positioned on my journey to.........well, wherever.

      Many will be aware of common signs of ageing such as going to a room to do something particular but on entering the room finding that the purpose for being there has been forgotten. My mind has developed this trait to a more advanced level and now I find when I do eventually remember the reason I entered the room I discover that I am in the wrong room to do it.

      This is but a trifling matter when I compare it to one of the issues I really want to discuss here and that is the case of my trembling hands.  They begin to shake when I hold on to objects like cups or cameras and because of this shakiness my handwriting has become illegible. In the age of the personal computer that should not pose a problem but I find that my shakiness influences my typing accuracy on the keyboard. I am continually correcting typing errors when my shaky finger only partly hits the intended letter key and also touches the neighbouring key. This means I am ever making spelling corrections. Of course I can always use the App which types to the sound of my dictation but I find that with my Scottish accent the spoken word does not always equate with what eventually appears in the text. 

     Associated with this phenomenon is the propensity with which all the things I need and use, preternaturally fall to the floor of their own volition. This is not only when I am holding them, picking them up, or putting them down but they are also under instruction from Isaac Newton when I walk past them.  It may be a poltergeist - I don't know - but I can tell you the ensuing bending down to pick them up is a struggle. It's alright if I have my long handled metal gripper nearby but it's seldom to be found in a handy position because it too deliberately and frequently falls to the floor and hides itself in places it can't be found.

Hand level object evolving into a low level one seeks a hiding place

When I am out and about and pull my wallet from my pocket, all the contents of the wallet: my debit, library, senior rail and others cards, inevitably fall to the pavement, or descend to the floor of the shop or café I happen to be in at the time. Occasionally they have fallen down street drains which has complicated matters to a point of impossibility. All this is an embarrassment to me and though I am grateful that younger, and sometimes not so very much younger people come to my rescue and bend over to pick up and return to me whichever of my belongings have obeyed the law of gravity, what is most shameful for me is the idea these thoughtful people have assessed me as one who looks as if he will struggle to bend down to pick up what I have dropped.  I can feel diminished by this. It's not good for the ego, yet I eventually come around to thinking "Damn my ego! I needed someone to help me.”

These often deliberatedly dive from my wallet

  For some reason the proclivity for things to fall down brought to mind the repeated phrase, “down to the ground, down to the ground.” It has become a line I can’t get out of my head and it is from a great Joan Armatrading song  Down to Zero .

.     I first saw and heard Joan Armatrading perform in February,1985 at the City Hall, Newcastle upon Tyne. She entertained us magnificently on that night. Her wide ranging, lyrical voice electrifies her songs. She's a great musician and peerless poet/songwriter. Down to Zero is not about the ageing process but more about sustaining self-belief in the face of adversity and certainly that has a great deal to do with growing older.

 I hope the song will inspire me to gee myself up and to act on an  aphorism of another great woman, Mary Ann Evans, (also known as George Eliot), who proposed, “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”  Well, maybe.