Best Books, Worst Books of the Past Four Years

Part 2 is coming, it really is. But in the meantime, some books.

Ten Great Hits

Early Morning Riser and Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny

In the past few years, Katherine Heiny has risen into my pantheon of great writers. I love her. She is so funny and makes such insightful observations and has the knack of putting her characters in situations that immediately engage. She’s a writer who proves that you don’t need to jump the shark to hold a reader’s interest. Instead she just lets us see what Richard Powers called ‘the irreducible complexity of the smallest, simplest day.’

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

One of those perfect novellas that come along every so often. A story about the subterranean workings of ethics inside us, and a profoundly uplifting story about one man doing the right thing against all the odds.

The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donaghue

An unexpected hit. I didn’t know much about this novel going into it, except it concerned a young woman’s relationship with her charismatic but deeply flawed university lecturer. I was afraid it would be the kind of story I’d read so many times before, but no. It’s full of surprises, and wonderfully written. It also captures the strange relationship to power that young adults have, being utterly hapless much of the time and then suddenly and alarmingly ruthless at others.

Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason

It’s so hard to be consistently amusing about dark situations, but the humour in this novel never faltered, no matter what nightmarish scenario the mentally challenged protagonist creates. I read that a lot of people were frustrated by the author’s refusal to name the condition she suffered from, but I felt it was a powerful choice. I could feel in myself how much the reading experience would have changed if I’d had a label to put to her behaviour. My focus would have shifted to evaluating the character according to what I knew of the mental illness, whereas the not knowing made me look more closely at the process of diagnosis, the character’s relationship to herself, the way illness can be used to justify actions that are really outrageous. I thought it made a lot of sense.

A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark

Sometimes the old ones are the best. Spark has created such a terrific narrative voice in this novel for Mrs Hawkins, and the representation of the publishing industry is quite fascinating. It was a different world back in the 1950s, and yet relatable and recognisable in a way that made me laugh hollowly and shake my head. Smart, acerbic, witty, assured, and yet capable of reaching great depths of feeling, this is a novel that pits the solidly good people of the earth against the chancers and rogues and desperate outcasts in a very satisfying way.

Yellowface by R. F. Kuang

This novel speaks so eloquently to the world of publishing as it is now, and made a terrific comparison with the Spark. Kuang absolutely hammers home the pointless aggression that dominates some forms of social media, and shows the sheer idiocy of using them as a way to measure the worth of literary work, when they are in fact about a performative emotional loop for the participants. In this novel it’s the rogue we’re encouraged to root for – or not, depending on your point of view. It’s a great study of the tortuous self-justification that takes the place of honour these days.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett

I have a problem with believing – as just about every writing course insists – that conflict is the only driver of a story. I gave a great big thank you to Ann Patchett for writing this and showing that the edict is nonsense. This is a charming, lyrical book, delicately slicing up the gradations of happiness and sadness, compassionate with youthful ambitions and wise about the gentle ordinariness that truly satisfies.

A Horse at Night; On Writing by Amina Cain

This was the most interesting book on reading and writing literature that I think I’ve ever read. That is all.

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

I’d like to write a proper review of this, the only problem being I have listened to it on Audible over a four-month period and so my memory is hazy in parts. It took that long to read because it is so crammed full of ideas and interpretations and it is fiercely intellectual. Which I think is a good thing. Just wish I could remember more of it.

Wifedom by Anna Funder

This is another book I wish I could review properly. I wanted to at the time, but again that was before Christmas. It’s controversial for the way Funder dramatises scenes from the marriage of Eileen and Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell, and I couldn’t decide how I felt about this choice. The scenes really work to draw you into the reality of their life together – but given this is non-fiction, and biography at that, how can we be sure that it WAS the reality of their life together? That being said, I found this uncertainty intriguing rather than annoying, and a kind of fascinating meta commentary on what biography tries to do. I also came out disliking George Orwell very much, and feeling quite incensed on behalf of his poor, downtrodden wife.

Five Controversial Misses

I apologise in advance for dissing anyone’s favourite book here. Reading is an odd experience, tyrannical in its immediacy, and thus both random and yet hard to change in retrospect. Maybe on a different day I would have loved them all? Who knows?

Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers

This should have been part of my best books list. I adored 95% of this novel and was then shocked beyond belief by the ending. I could not see the point of it. In fact, I felt that it undercut all possible meaning in the story. The ending of a novel is the place from which you can finally look back and understand what you have been reading. This ending turned a book about second chances and hope and the possibility of miracles into a dark smack in the face of the reader. Not cool.

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on my Little Pain by Victoria Mackenzie

I was very excited to read this, anticipating something special, and I kept on anticipating it right up to the end, when I was finally forced to admit I’d somehow missed its finer qualities. And I do think I must have missed the point of this novel. It read easily and smoothly and quickly. Following the spiritual journeys of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe was intriguing. There was an ending in which the women met, perplexingly laid out as if it were a stage script. And that was it. I just thought there would be….. more somehow.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Oh how I wanted to love this book! I enjoyed the start, hoped for great things from this novel about sisters on wildly different trajectories, and then realised about a third of the way in that I didn’t care and couldn’t be bothered. The story sort of died on me. I didn’t mean to stop reading; I just put it down one day and never managed to return.

Real Estate by Deborah Levy

The first volume in Levy’s trilogy of memoirs, Things I Don’t Want to Know, is probably on my all time top ten list. The second volume, The Cost of Loving, took me longer to get into but I enjoyed it very much by the end. This final volume was simply too self-indulgent for me. Too meandering. And the phrase ‘best male friend’ became the symbol of all that was repetitive and icky about it. Again this must be me because general opinion says this is a great book. Perhaps it’s because I loved the first volume so much? That had such a force to it, so much intention. Real Estate, by contrast, is a magpie book, all shiny bits and pieces plucked from disparate places and collected together as if they meant something. Poor Deborah Levy. I either love what she does or hate it.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

Oh dear, this won the Pulitzer, didn’t it? Another book I half intended to review, under the title of ‘Less Grizzling’. Basically, I was confused. I thought this was meant to be a novel about a poor, beleaguered male author who had no luck in life, and to whom amusing disasters happened. But it wasn’t. Arthur Less certainly talked up the self-pity, but at every turn he proved himself the privileged alpha male. He wins the random chilli eating contest in Mexico City. He goes to Turin when his novel is shortlisted for a prize, convinced he’ll be humiliated, and he wins that prize, too. On the trip across the desert, his companions fall one by one to a mysterious illness, but he’s still standing at the end. And then when he does injure his foot, he is whisked away to a five-star paradise island where he gets to rewrite his current MS in peaceful luxury. And finally, on his return home, he finds the boyfriend whose wedding he’s been avoiding on this round the world trip, waiting for him with open arms. So what did he have to moan about? Beats me.

Would love to hear what your best and worst books of the past few years have been!