This year started very normally but has become deeply strange. Chris has not been well. Plans have had to change suddenly. I have been caught mid-thought, at that peculiar moment of transition between one book and the next. This has happened to me before but never, I don’t think, which such violently immediate effect.
Something good has always come out of such derangement in the past, so I am keeping faith with that knowledge. In the meantime, books.
The best, the most impactful, the most personally significant book I have read so far this year has been Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. If I could hold up one book and say this is the kind of thing I want to write, the level of achievement I intend to keep before me as my perfect example, it would be this one. I think about it most days. The quality of the writing. The vision. The timelessness, which is the stuff legends are made of. A book that both transcends and suitably honours its source material.
Second comes a reread: Swimming Home, by Deborah Levy, which I read when it first came out and found slight, and vaguely annoying. This time round I got it, and it’s a masterpiece. Again, I think about it most days. Please read this wonderful article, if you haven’t already.
Third would have been The Shards, by Bret Easton Ellis, a great bollocking romper stomper of a book that helped keep me going through the earlier part of this month, the most perfectly addictive long novel I’ve read since first discovering the Stephen King doorstoppers – Salem’s Lot especially – that The Shards is at least in part a homage to. Then, like King, Ellis blows it in the final quarter. I am convinced he rolled with this thing right into the last hundred pages without properly understanding how he wanted it to end. So he stuck in a stupid knife fight. Heavy disappointment. But it’ll stick with me, I guess, and the guy can write, so.
Honourable mentions go to Julie Myerson’s brilliant The Lost Child, Rachel Cusk’s The Last Supper, Gordon Burn’s inimitable Alma Cogan, Benjamin Myers’s Cuddy and of course M. John Harrison’s Wish I Was Here, which is more than an honourable mention, it’s in its own category. So far as weird precursors go, it is the epitome.
Looking forward to the Booker longlist, as I always do. Hoping to post here more often as the year progresses.