#allenderreadinglist2021

[robinallender]

As ever, I didn’t read as much as I wanted to in 2021 and, of course, I still haven’t finished Finnegans Wake. Here are a few more books I finished this year and the complete list is below.

A Lonely Man by Chris Power is a brilliant and ingeniously layered literary thriller. Like a postmodern Le Carre with much to say about what stories are ours to tell.

The Eighth Girl by Maxine Mei-Fung Chung has an interesting premise (a multiple-personality psychological thriller) but I found the writing clunky and cliched at times (the phrase ‘murder of crows’ appears twice). Great story though and I’ll be interested to see the TV adaptation if it comes to light.

I read Satan is Real in preparation for my interview with Wendy Erskine for Your Own Personal Beatles. Two brilliantly written and very disturbing short stories. I can’t wait to read Wendy’s new collection Dance Move which is published next year. When I spoke to Wendy she had just interviewed Paul Muldoon so I also read his latest collection of poems Howdie-Skelp, which is playful, inscrutable and surprisingly filthy. Muldoon of course edited the collection of Paul McCartney’s Lyrics this year so it was nice to see a mention of ‘Lovely Rita’ in the poem ‘An Item’.

Shappi Khorsandi also appeared on Your Own Personal Beatles this year and I absolutely loved her book A Beginner’s Guide to Acting English. Shappi writes so well from the point of view of a child and this memoir is a really extraordinary account of her family’s arrival in the UK following the Iranian Revolution in the late 70s.

Happy new year to you all – my resolution for next year is to only read one book at a time!

Here are all the other books I read in 2021:

Close to the Bone – Stuart MacBride The Death of Francis Bacon – Max Porter Asylum Road – Olivia Sudjic Girl A – Abigail Dean Klara and the Sun – Kazuo Ishiguro The Dark is Rising – Susan Cooper Boy Parts – Eliza Clark My Phantoms – Gwendoline Riley (my book of the year) Delicacy: A Memoir about Cake and Death – Katy Wix What Belongs to You – Garth Greenwell No One is Talking about This – Patricia Lockwood Sweet Home – Wendy Erskine A Song for the Dark Times – Ian Rankin How to Write One Song – Jeff Tweedy The Last Landlady – Laura Thompson Acts of Desperation – Megan Nolan Good Morning, Midnight – Jean Rhys A Pale View of Hills – Kazuo Ishiguro Beautiful World, Where Are You? – Sally Rooney Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy Beatles ’66: The Revolutionary Year – Steve Turner The Beatles: The Authorised Biography – Hunter Davies

[robinallender]

A poplar in the immediate foreground was like an ink stroke on burnished tin.

Loved this but can’t believe Thomas Hardy couldn’t be bothered to describe hoofprints so just drew them instead. Lazy!

[robinallender]

I don’t have much to add to the endless ‘discourse’ about Sally Rooney (besides, I’m a bit late), except to say that she preempts much of the criticism that has been (unfairly) thrown her way in the book itself. She writes brilliantly about the role of the novel and the coarsening of public debate, where nuance is lost between the ‘transcendentally good’ and the ‘personally evil’. The idea that her novels are somehow slight (something Will Self has insinuated) is irritating too – she writes about love. Love is quite important, isn’t it? Also, her characters are not her, which is something that needs to be blazoned across the cosmos in skywriting next time she publishes a novel.

It was so peaceful just to watch him, his fine handsome figure, making his way through the deep blue liquid darkness of December, his quiet solitude, his self-containment, and she felt so happy, so grateful that they lived in the same city, where she could see him even without meaning to, where he could appear like this in front of her just when she needed most to see him, someone who had loved her for her entire life.

[robinallender]

I’m trying to catch up with my book blog again! I hadn’t read Ishiguro’s first novel before; it’s an enigmatic, disturbing story that establishes some of the key themes of his later books: memory, loss, strangeness itself. I also read Klara and the Sun this year and am writing a post about it which has somehow exceeded 5000 words, so I hope to share that soon.

It is possible that my memory of these events will have grown hazy with time, that things did not happen in quite the way they come back to me today.

[robinallender]

But this is my attitude to life. Please, please, monsieur et madame, mister, missis and miss, I am trying so hard to be like you. I know I don’t succeed, but look how hard I try. Three hours to choose a hat; every morning an hour and a half trying to make myself look like everybody else. Every word I say has chains round its ankles; every thought I think is weighted with heavy weights. Since I was born, hasn’t every word I’ve said, every thought I’ve thought, everything I’ve done, been tied up, weighted, chained? And, mind you, I know that with all this I don’t succeed. Or I succeed in flashes only too damned well… But think how hard I try and how seldom I dare. Think – and have a bit of pity. That is, if you ever think, you apes, which I doubt.

[robinallender]

—As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, said Stephen, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. 

Happy Bloomsday!

[robinallender]

And then with no more ado the people’s centre became part of the backdrop just like everything else, and in the untended patches at the back of the building, the knotweed grew towards the sun.

Brilliant collection of short stories from this Northern Irish writer. Dark and funny and alive to the rhythms of everyday speech. Also, proof that The Beatles are completely inescapable because Rocky Raccoon turns up in one story.

[robinallender]

Much laughter in the dark in this deadly serious comic novel. Beneath the jokes, the obsession with the ephemera of social media and the (unbelievable) coarseness there are serious concerns with how language is being transformed by the internet, and with what is happening to our ability to be sincere about personal and political trauma in our meme-saturated age. In the second half of the novel this comes into focus as the protagonist encounters real and insurmountable grief. My favourite moment comes when her family have a fit of giggles in the office of a funeral director, which kind of sums the whole thing up.