Books Of The Year - November Update

Occasionally in emails or tweets or blog comments I get asked what I'm reading at the moment or have enjoyed recently. It's an easy question for me to answer as I've been keeping a meticulous, nerdy, indexed (!) reading log that dates back to 1993. 
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I have no reading plan or set books; I don't read for self improvement (I'm with Dr Johnson on this one); I read exactly what I want to read when I want to (except occasionally when I have to read stuff for the newspaper). This then (below) is what my 2013 log looks like so far without the cross referencing, notes and index. The list is in chronological order. The grades are highly subjective, provisional and change frequently as time passes (and as you can see I'm a pretty easy grader).

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1. Plainwater - Anne Carson B

2. The Professor - Terry Castle A 

3. Just My Type - Simon Garfield B

4. The Generals - (audiobook) Thomas E Ricks A+

5. The Antidote - Oliver Burkeman B+

6. Why Does The World Exist - Jim Holt (began in 2012) B+

7. The Yellow Birds - Kevin Powers (began in 2012) C+

8. Thinking The Twentieth Century - Tony Judt A

9. Our Times - AN Wilson B

10. The Killer Angels - Michael Shaara A

11. The Swerve - Stephen Greenblatt D

12. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - David Foster Wallace A

13. The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton - Anne Sexton A

14. Desolation Island - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) B+ * 

15. The Fortune of War - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) B+ *

16. Daniel Deronda - George Eliot B+

17. A Town Like Alice - Nevile Shute D

18. TransAtlantic - Colum McCann A

19. The Old Ways: a Journey On Foot - Robert Macfarlane (audiobook) A
20. Hope: A Tragedy - Sholem Auslander B
21. The Crimson Petal And The White - Michel Faber A
22. The Far Side Of The World - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) A*
23. Socrates and a Platypus Go Into A Bar - Daniel Klein E
23. The Reverse of The Medal - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) A*
24. Inferno - Dan Brown (audiobook) C

25. The Thirteen Gun Salute - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) B+*
26. How To Live: A Life Of Montaigne In 21 Questions And An Answer - Sarah Bakewell B
27. Miami Blues - Charles Willeford A
28. Into The Silence - Wade Davis A
29. The Truelove - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) C*
30. The Finish - Mark Bowden B
31. The Wild Places - Robert Macfarlane C
32. Armchair Nation - Joe Moran A
33. The Wine Dark Sea - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) A*
34. Harry Potter And The Chamber of Secrets - JK Rowling E
35. Wool 1-5 - Hugh Howey B
36. Sinead Morrissey - Parallax A
37. The Luminaries - Elanor Catton A
38. Red or Dead - David Peace A+
39. Edgelands - Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley A+
40. Longbourn - Jo Baker A
41. The Broken Road - Patrick Leigh Fermor A
42. Autobiography - Morrissey A

The books that have really stuck out for me in 2013 so far have been The Generals, Red or Dead, Edgelands and Morrissey's Autobiography, and the Luminaries was pretty good too. As you can see I've had a pretty amazing run of books in the last 2 months beginning with Sinead Morrissey's Parallax and ending (so far) with the Moz himself. In case this gets taken as a kind of my-books-of-the-year blog (which I'll probably be too lazy to actually write) I should also mention the new crime novels by Declan Burke (Slaughter's Hound) and John McFetridge (Black Rock) both of which I read last year in galley and both of which I rank A+. Additionally, I just got the new Ian Rankin yesterday and although I've only looked at the cover, that smells like an A too. 
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* I'm working my way through the Patrick O'Brian audiobooks for the 4th time.

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Morrissey On Lost In Space

One of the delights of Morrissey's Autobiography is his TV criticism. Precious novelists from the Iowa Writer's Workshop can write memoirs with titles like "When I Was Young I Read Books" but working class British kids either played in the street when it wasn't raining or watched TV when it was. All British kids watched the same shows because there were only 3 channels and the BBC and ITV repeated their programmes endlessly; no American I've ever met has heard of, say, Champion The Wonder Horse, but every Brit over a certain age, including Morrissey, has memories of rainy Saturday mornings watching dreary 50's fare like that. One of Morrissey's more entertaining spiels is about the much more familiar show, Lost in Space. I wasn't a huge fan of Lost in Space and when I watched it it was mostly because of Penny Robinson but for Morrissey the gratingly sane Robinsons
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
                                                 















Pretty good, eh? And don't get him started on Captain Pugwash...  

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Morrissey and The 10 Greatest Rock Memoirs

I've been reading Morrissey's memoir, Autobiography, published by Penguin Classics (!) and I have to say that so far it's been pretty great. I'll do a full review when I'm done but what I like about the opening chapters is Morrissey's voice and his beautiful evocation of the Irish diaspora community in 1960's Manchester. There have been several negative reviews of the book, one by Stuart Maconie in The Guardian which I respect and a silly and typically unfocused one by The New Yorker's pop music critic, Sasha Frere Jones that I completely discount. Frere Jones has annoyed me for years because he's an aristocrat who - I reckon - only got his job through influential connections, in hundreds of articles he's evinced no understanding of pop music at all, and by a long way he's the New Yorker's dullest writer. Of course maybe I'm biased, I've always liked Morrissey, and I've done a few oblique shout outs to his music and his prose skills over the years in my books (you may have noticed several mentions of The Cramps' Fanzine Legion of the Cramped in at least two of my novels: Legion of course was edited by Morrissey and was his first prose work.) 
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If it continues to be this good Autobiography could get into the unofficial top 10 list of rock memoirs, which is the kind of thing Morrissey would hold in utter contempt. What are the greatest rock memoirs? Well, there's a list on Rolling Stone Magazine, here, but its a bit of a dodgy effort as you'll see if you go over there. (It really took a ghost writer of genius to make Steven Tyler's life incredibly boring and to include his memoir on their list proves that a) they haven't read the book or b) they have no literary compass at all.) I reckon that you need 3 elements to produce a really great rock and roll memoir: 1) Solid music credentials. 2) Good anecdotes. 3) Good writing. You can be missing or weak in one of these elements but if you're missing in 2 its fatal. Morrissey has all three working for him so far in my read (but the Guardian says the book declines after the midway point).  
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So what are the best rock memoirs? I'm not going to pretend to be some big well read music guy. I'm not. I haven't read a lot memoirs period and I certainly haven't read everything on the Rolling Stone list (or would want to) but for what it's worth here's my little list of the 10 best rock autobiographies which I have actually read. I'm putting Morrissey in at number 7 for now...My number 1 memoir is John Lydon's Rotten: No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs and coincidentally if you look at my list it turns out that being black, Irish or Jewish is a big plus when it comes to rock memoir writing...

10. Touching From A Distance: Deborah Curtis
9. Twisting My Melon: Shaun Ryder
8. The Hacienda - How Not To Run A Club: Peter Hook
7. Autobiography: Morrissey
6. The Tao of Wu: The RZA
5. Take It Like A Man: Boy George 
4. Chronicles: Bob Dylan
3. Rat Girl: Kristin Hersh
2. Just Kids: Patti Smith
1. Rotten - No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs: John Lydon 

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Why I Loathe Downton Abbey

A post from last October when I was living in Seattle and I saw Downton Abbey for the first time on PBS and was somewhat hooked and somewhat aghast...(I'm a lot mellower now, I promise.)
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I hadn't seen Downton Abbey until this weekend but I knew it sounded dodgy because The Daily Mail has been boosting it for the last two years and anything The Daily Mail loves is prima facie revolting. The paper who drooled over Hitler until September 1 1939 (and secretly until May 1940) has long been a champion of reactionary rhetoric and causes. But I've been puzzled by Downton Abbey because it keeps winning awards and Hollywood is far to the left of The Daily Mail. What gives? I decided that I should probably watch this show and decide for myself, which is what I did on Sunday.  
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The first thing to say is that Downton Abbey is right wing patrician propaganda of the silliest kind. The benevolent view of the upper classes and the condescending treatment of the lower orders is so sniveling and ridiculous that I wonder that the cast doesn't blush with shame every time they go on set. All the cruelest, wickedest characters live below stairs and although the upstairs ladies and gents sometimes are a bit bitchy basically they are the benevolent overloads of the Empire. Johnny Foreigner is not to be trusted in Downton Abbey be he greasy Turk or gauche American and in one embarrassing scene even the Irish Republican chauffeur breaks down and admits that he secretly worships the English ruling class. So I can see why The Daily Mail loves this show. They would like nothing less than to turn back the clock to 1913 when the lower orders and women knew their place and puffy faced men ruled one quarter of the globe from London clubs. But why do the Emmy voters love Downton Abbey too? Well just because it's reactionary nonsense doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad show. Some of my favourite writers have been right wing nuts: Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin spring to mind. And what Downton has going for it is the fact that its pretty funny. Maggie Smith is a gem and wisely they have a policy of giving her all the best lines. Dame Maggie Smith could read the phone book (is there still a phone book?) and make it entertaining and here she has sensibly decided to ignore her actual character and just play Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell for all she's worth. However like Tom Reagan being led into the woods of Miller's Crossing the snappy dialogue does tend to dry up as time marches on. Series 2 doesn't have too many gags and when Dame Maggie isn't on screen the charisma drops by a million candle power. Without good dialogue you start to notice the actual plot and the plot, good Lord, is the cheesiest of cheesy soap opera. It's a prettily shot and wonderfully lit soap opera though, with ravishing costumes, nice frocks and an attractive cast (well attractive for England anyway). So I think the Emmy voters like Downton Abbey because most of them are actors and actors dig soap opera and American actors in particular tend to think anything from the BBC and England is classy (even though Downton Abbey is actually a production of ITV). 
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If Downton Abbey were a better show its values might stir the blood and hasten the revolution but it's so vulgar and cliched and laughable that no one is going to get too worked up about it. It gets its facts wrong all the time (in one episode set in 1918 two characters were talking about the "rising that happened in Dublin last Easter") and it gets cheesier and lazier as Julian Fellowes (his actual name is, get this, Julian Alexander Kitchener-Fellowes, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford) runs of material. But like I say none of this matters that much. Downton Abbey can be enjoyed by many walks of American life: ladies with cats, ladies without cats who like old frocks, Anglophile gay men, conservatives longing for the good old days, and Brits abroad (for ironic mocking reasons). The intersection of all these types and thus the ideal American viewer of Downton Abbey would have to be Quentin Crisp but he, alas, has passed. 

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Edgelands

An interesting Edgeland that I saw last month in the Huon Valley, Tasmania:
half junkyard, half sheep pasture

A few months ago when I blogged about Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways I said that it was almost as if the book was designed specifically to please me (in contrast to much of our current culture which seems to be designed specifically to annoy the hell out of me)...In The Old Ways Macfarlane followed some of the ancient walking routes of Europe and conjured up the literary ghosts of previous travellers on those routes, particularly the poet Edward Thomas. The Old Ways became an unlikely international best seller on the strength of its writing and by appealing to the inner yearning of urban based reviewers and readers for the beauty of the great outdoors. Edgelands is a travel book written by two poets, Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley, which is a kind of anti-Robert Macfarlane. Instead of looking for the wilderness at the top of Scotland or in some deep wadi in Palestine Roberts and Farley find the strange, wild and wonderful just down the road from us in that bit of wasteland behind the bus station or in old quarries or junkyards or abandoned factories or canals. In Edgelands the spirit is less Robert Macfarlane and John Muir and more JG Ballard and William Burroughs. The book sets out to be an exploration of "England's True Wilderness" and it reminded me of Ballard's Unlimited Dream Company and Concrete Island and Ian Sinclair's walk around the M25 recorded in London Orbital. Because the authors are poets who love poetry there is a full length poem or a lengthy extract in nearly every chapter from many great contemporary poets. Even more so than Macfarlane the authors realise that it is poets and artists who can see through the mundane to the sublime beyond. (I forgot who it was that said that if you stare at anything long enough it becomes beautiful.)
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Roberts and Farley celebrate the weirdness of all night golf driving range, container parks, scrubby woods, motorway service stations, airport car parks and they see loveliness - as, famously, Derek Mahon does - in burned out hotels, old alleys and dereliction. This, as I say, is a kind of anti Robert Macfarlane aesthetic but it's just as good as him (better actually in some ways because the authors have a sense of humour) and it even comes with a generous blurb from Macfarlane on the back cover. I don't know if it's been published in the US or Australia but you can get it on Amazon.co.uk and you can read a bit of it there too. 

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In The Morning I'll Be Gone

locked and bolted from the inside...

I finally finished the page proofs and copy edits of the third book in my Sean Duffy series In The Morning I'll Be Gone this week. The very last thing I had to do was get the permission of Tom Waits to use a verse from his song "I'll Be Gone" as the book's epigraph. Tom Waits doesn't always give permission for his stuff to be used in other contexts so I was pretty relieved when the rights came through last weekend. You can listen to the marvellous I'll Be Gone, here. (It's from the album "Frank's Wild Years" and in my opinion it contains some of funniest lines in all of twentieth century popular music.) 
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The bulk of my In The Morning I'll Be Gone is taken up with a locked room mystery. I've never written a locked room mystery before but I've read several over the years and designing one has been an extremely enjoyable intellectual exercise. And rest assured that I'm not the kind of bastard who will cheat you with a supernatural solution or who won't give you enough information to solve the puzzle for yourselves. I certainly won't insult your intelligence and lie to you (the unforgivable sin of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo's locked room portion.)
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You can read the first draft of the first 6 chapters of In The Morning I'll Be Gone, here. The book has changed a little bit since this first draft: it's tighter and I think funnier but these first draft chapters certainly give you a little of its flavour. And you can of course get the first two volumes of the, ahem, award winning, Duffy series on Amazon, Audible, Book Depository or at all reputable book shops. This may be the last (Duffy) book I ever write so hopefully you'll enjoy this swansong, if it is the swansong...

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Cormac McCarthy's The Counselor

in the Counselor people say lots of banal sentences like this (above)
convinced that they're telling you the wisdom of the ages... 

In America Cormac McCarthy is unassailable. He has a cast iron literary reputation, a legion of fans and highly placed champions in the upper echelons of American literary culture. All with good reason. His Tennessee novels are masterpieces and Blood Meridian is one of the greatest American novels of the last 50 years. But (and you knew a but was coming didn't you?) just as his reputation has grown over the last twenty years so his actual novels have - in my opinion - declined. I reckon we hit Peak McCarthy probably somewhere in the Blood Meridian/All The Pretty Horses years. I wasn't a huge fan of The Road which had great stretches of purple prose (and that's rich coming from me, but hey a cat can look at a king, right?), I found No Country For Old Men to be a wee bit hacky with the lyrical prose attempting to cover up gaping plot holes and some dodgy Palinesque tea party politics. And as for parts 2 and 3 of the Border Trilogy, they were, in retrospect, grim and rather tedious sub-par efforts. 
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So what to make of The Counselor, Cormac McCarthy's first foray into screenwriting at the age of 80? Maybe I'm not the right person to ask. Maybe you should ask a true McCarthy fan or maybe the screenplay should only be read in the context of the film, a film I have not yet seen. As you can see I'm doing a lot of hedging here because I found The Counselor screenplay to be a pretty excruciating business. It's the story of a lawyer, The Counselor, who gets mixed up with the Mexican Cartel and an exotic, beautiful woman. That's really all you need to know. It's McCarthy's universe so you understand that all is not going to go well and evil will triumph in the end. The Counselor reads like pretty much every American noir movie of the last 20 years and no cliche is left in the box: the femme fatale, the Mexicans, the drugs, the lifestyles of the rich and famous, the naive guy in over his head, misogyny, a reactionary ideology with an ever so subtle racism. (I expect you've noticed that for all Hollywood's supposed liberalism the vast majority of its films are deeply conservative.) We even get a cat stroking villain, although McCarthy must have thought that that was ok because the cat is a cheetah. 
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There are certain conventions in noir and if you buy into the logic of the story you can sort of forget all the cliches and just go with it but here I couldn't go with it because what really banjaxes up The Counselor is the dialogue. It's a complete embarrassment from start to finish. Humans don't talk like this. Not even in a David Mamet movie. Corny doesn't come close to describing this stuff. Go on read it here for yourself if you don't believe me. It's as if Cormac McCarthy has decided to channel not Quentin Tarantino but whoever the guys were who wrote one of those many post Pulp Fiction rip offs like Two Days In The Valley or Destiny Turns On The Radio. Yikes. The cod philosophy and the unerotic "dirty talking" made me hang my head in shame for the man who wrote Child of God and Outer Dark. If there's a precise inverse of the authenticity and integrity that someone like Louis CK brings to his screenplays The Counselor is exactly it. 
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But, of course, none of this matters. The Counselor has a 10 million dollar marketing campaign behind it and is completely critic proof. And at least three times in his career Ridley Scott has turned pretty ordinary scripts into cinematic works of genius. Its the final film that matters not the screenplay. And I guarantee you one thing: the film WILL be better than the screenplay because the screenplay is mortifying. I suppose the only long term damage will be to McCarthy's reputation: critics, especially British critics, will use the screenplay of The Counselor to prove that they were right to be skeptical and that the emperor really did have no clothes after all. 

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