Books of 2017

Another year in books has flown by. After my book challenge in 2015, I've been keeping lists of all the books I read through 2016 and this year. As in previous years, I'm always surprised to find which books I read not even half a year ago; amazing how quickly you forget when it was that you read something. On the other hand, some novels I feel like I've just finished them while that turns out to have been more than a year ago.
No reading goals, just keeping up the numbers. I read 23 books this year, which is 2 up from last year. Mainly, I think, because I didn't tackle any big literary reads (like Anna Karenina last year) and there were some rereads, which are always faster. As always, some books have already been discussed at length, while others may have their first mention on this blog right below.

The complete list for 2017:

1 The High Mountains of Portugal
2 The Sellout
3 Juliet, naked
4 Black Swan Green
5 The Outrun
6 Last Orders
7 The Handmaid's Tale
8 How to be good
9 The Jane Austen book club
10 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
11 Hag-Seed
12 The Joy Luck Club
13 England and other stories
14 Mijn Meneer
15 The Light Years
16 The North Water
17 Marking Time
18 Here I am
19 Confusion
20 The Best of Adam Sharp
21 Cloud Atlas
22 Exit West
23 Casting Off

So, five rereads; Juliet, naked, Black Swan Green, The Jane Austen bookclub, Harry Potter, and Cloud Atlas, two of which are by the ever-popular David Mitchell. The Joy Fowler and JK Rowling were because there was a bit in the summer where I wanted to read but not invest actual brainpower into the reading, so I went back to some really easy rereads. Only one Dutch book, which is also the only non-fiction title on the list (although it is partly fictionalized, it is the autobiographical account of Ted van Lieshout's youth). Technically only one short story collection (England and other stories), although one could count The Joy Luck Club as short stories (I read one of the chapters as a 'separate' short story during my studies). No classics at all. I was going to say 'no Americans' until I realised both The Sellout and Here I Am are written by Americans; somehow they both disappeared from my mind pretty quickly. No new novels by Ian McEwan, or David Mitchell, or any of my other popular authors, simply because there weren't any. Actually, now that I think of it: no Ian McEwan at all this year. After the triple McEwan there may have been a slight overdose, but still; this must be the first time in about 10 years that I read no novel by Ian McEwan for a whole year. This will surely be rectified in 2018.

Let's break the novels that I did read down into some lists:

Best English novel
1 Exit West
2 Last Orders
3 The Handmaid's Tale
A difficult choice this year! Exit West is clearly the winner; another Mohsin Hamid novel that I dearly loved. It is a very contemporary novel, featuring a couple from a unspecified Middle Eastern country fleeing through one of the mysterious doors that keep opening up all over the world, leading to other places. It is both mystical and very realistic, and I'm sad it didn't make Man Booker this year, as it would have been a deserved winner (I've just started reading the novel that did win, and Exit West would beat it with its hands tied behind its back at this point). Do read something by Hamid!
Last Orders is Graham Swift's Man Booker 1996 winning novel, which gave me the combined emotions of a WWII novel and The Full Monty, with it's 'band of brothers'-like bantering and the emotions simmering under a surface of beer and beautiful language. Same goes for The Handmaid's Tale; it's old, it's great, I've written all you need to know when I read it. Funnily enough, both Last Orders and The Handmaid's Tale could count as my 'classics' this year; they are both over 20 years old, and still very current.

Best Dutch novel/classics
Non-existent this year. Strange, as I did get lots of new novels, and have a pretty long backlog in both these categories. They must never have been at the top of the to-read list.

Best non-fiction/best short story collection
Only one novel in each of these categories this year, so not really lists to speak of.

Best fantasy/scifi novel
1 Exit West
2 The Handmaid's Tale
3 The High Mountains of Portugal
Not a lot of these to go around either, but I would of course have put in Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green if they hadn't been rereads. Two of these also feature in my Best English novel list, but The High Mountains of Portual deserves special mention. Yann Martel, like Mohsin Hamid and David Mitchell, can capture you with a world that is very much like ours, but than turns out to be slightly unlike ours in a magical way, and your suspension of disbelief just goes with that until you find yourself in their made-up world still fully believing that these things could really happen here and now. Realistic fantasy, a true escape into literature.

Best 'new' author
1 Elizabeth Jane Howard
2 Graham Swift
3 Margaret Atwood
Only Elizabeth Jane Howard is really a 'new' author for 2017, and I've written enough about her novels in my previous blog post. But Graham Swift and Margaret Atwood are some of my recent discoveries of whom I want to read more. I'd read my first novel by Swift, Mothering Sunday, as one of my last novels in 2016 and this year I continued with Last Orders and his short-story collection England and other stories. I'd have wanted Wish you were here on the list as well, but it went into reprint just as I ordered it, so that will have to go for 2018 (when I wrote about Last Orders in March it had also disappeared from view in the bookshop, so I'll have to look into that...). Margaret Atwood is not really a 'new' author for me, as I read Oryx & Crake during my English studies, but she is one of the authors I've put on my 'must read more' list. This year I read The Handmaid's Tale and Hag-seed, both of which are great in their own way. I got The Heart goes Last a couple of weeks ago, so she will also feature in the 2018 list.

Most disappointing novel
1 How to be good
2 The Sellout
3 The Outrun
(4 The Best of Adam Sharp)
Wow, this was really the easiest category to fill this year. Not a good sign. I was looking forward to How to be good, one of the few Hornby novels I'd never read, but it was thoroughly disappointing. Moralistic, full of angry relationship issues, with a wavering plot and unlikeable characters. The Sellout was the Man Booker winner of 2016, so naturally I read it, but I didn't like it at all. It is supposed to be a funny social commentary on contemporary America, but I can't remember finding any bit of it funny. The main character struck me as pathetic, his backstory was unbelievable and the plot even more so. The Outrun appeared to be good at first; girl returns to small town Orkney life after her big-city London life blows up in her face, but in the end it didn't really go anywhere, the character didn't come to life for me as in so many of these 'woman retreats to find herself' novels. Special mention for The Best of Adam Sharp, again a novel by Graeme Simpsion that disappointed. It felt like a slight do-over of The Rosie Project, with some High Fidelity elements thrown in. He really turned out only one good novel, his first, and I will now stop reading whatever else he writes until the recommendations tell me it really is too great to miss.

Authors I read more than once
- Elizabeth Jane Howard (4x)
- Margaret Atwood (2x)
- Graham Swift (2x)
- Nick Hornby (2x, one reread and one new)
- David Mitchell (2x, both rereads)

Netherland

During my English studies, there were several courses aimed at 'contemporary literature'. In my view, 'contemporary literature' was often translated to 'literature written by people not born in the UK, US, or Australia' or 'post-9/11 literature' (or combinations of the two, such as The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which I'll suggest to anyone who will listen). Somehow, post-9/11 novels attract other post-9/11 novels, which means my book collection has a relatively large amount of them. Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill, has been among them for a while, and after finishing Bridget I wanted to get on with something that was actually literature, and contained more emotions than 'will he ever tweet me back?'-angst.

Before we go any further, I would like to say that the category 'post-9/11 novels' does not contain any novel ever written after the 11th of September 2001. It indicates novels that were written in response to the 9/11 attacks, or that have been influenced by them. Some are very clearly in this category, such as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, some less obviously so, including Ian McEwan's Saturday. Some take place in New York City and deal with the obvious aftermaths of the events, some are set in the countries that the US invaded after the attacks (I've read We are Now Beginning Our Descent by James Meek, which is set in Afghanistan and Iraq) and some take place in a fictional future also influenced by the events. What they all, or most of them, have in common is an atmosphere filled with heaviness ("Something oppressive... like thunder" as Fiver tells us in Watership Down). People going through the motions, without actually thinking about it, mostly just to stay alive. Or on the other hand, people desperately trying to get out of the oppressed feelings, only to find themselves thrown back time and again. It's not that I particularly like reading about people who find themselves in such situations, but I am very impressed by the way writers can put these emotions through in their works, and they make me see why Literature is Literature, and what it can do.

So, back to Netherland, which has been sitting on my bookshelf for quite a while now. I had been advised to read it by many fellow students, some of whom had to read the novel for a class, so it has to be particularly good if they recommend it after having been forced to read it themselves. I had no idea what or who this novel was going to be about before picking it up, only that it was on the post-9/11 category. I didn't know, for example, that the main character is a Dutchman. And that there would be several Dutch words and sentences interwoven in the text, without translation or context, which I'm guessing makes them pretty hard to understand for non-Dutch people. Also, it gives an extra layer to the title, which is nice.
As if a Dutch protagonist isn't enough, the novel is also about cricket. There are few things I consider less American than cricket, but there you are. I don't know anything about cricket, either (which made a certain chapter in The Go-Between very difficult to read), but the author does a good job of not making that an issue. Otherwise, it's about New York City, and relationships between people, and how those relationships were stressed to the point of breaking in the aftermaths of the events.

Now I've been to NYC, I've seen the gaping hole and visited the church that the rescue workers slept in while they were searching the wreckage and read the memorials and I still don't feel like I've come even a little bit closer to understanding what happened and why it made such an impact. (I can see the national and global impact, but I'm talking about the man on the street, the 'normal' New Yorkers who didn't lose any loved ones but had to go on living in a scarred city, in a world that would never really be the same again.) But this novel can show me, if even only a little bit. It makes you understand the events, and try to accept them, or at least give them a place. I haven't finished the novel yet, so I don't know which way it's going to go, but I can already see it will make a lasting impression on my understanding of life, the universe and everything, which is what you need, once in a while.

The read-on moment

So I've been reading The Hundred-Year-Old Man who Climbed out of a Window and Disappeared, the novel that ' everybody'  has read and that is still in the top 10 of English novels at my local book shop (where, probably, about 10 people buy an English book a week, so it may not be a very accurate representation), and to tell you the truth, I didn't like it very much.
The writing style interesting, typically Scandinavian (even in translation this shines through), and it takes a while to get into. Jonasson likes to explain things that are very very obvious. He likes to give so many details that when asked you could actually tell which colour someones toe-nails were painted. He likes to make most of his characters either very stupid or very weird. All of this is amusing, funny even, when you start to read, but as you get to page 50 you start to think: is he still using this trick? I'm kinda done with it now!
Around page 150, I was seriously contemplating not reading any more. I hardly ever put down a book without completely finishing it, but this might have been one of those rare cases.
But then, somehow, he made me read on. It was not that the story gripped me (I won't spoil too much, but it is sort of a murder-mystery combined with Forrest Gump, only in this world, Forrest would be one of the normal guys compared to most of the characters), you can see where this story is going from about chapter 2. No, his writing style somehow got better, more natural, less in-your-face typical. The annoying little side-steps and superfluous 'of course' and minute detail somehow worked. It felt like Jonasson himself was struggling to get to this part of the novel, and now that he was half-way, and knew where it was going, he could somehow relax and write better.
Which is funny, because that is exactly what happens when I write a novel.
But leaving that aside, for me, every novel has sort of a 'read-on' moment, when you get totally immersed in the story and just cannot put it down. For some novels, this is the first line, such as "Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much" or "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her" (if you don't know where these are from and do care, look them up). Sometimes it takes a while, such as with A Game of Thrones, the novel that a friend had been bugging me to read for months some time around 2004, and when I finally started, it took quite a while for me to like it (I've re-read it several times now, and it still takes a while). Several Neil Gaiman novels have the same effect. Other novels you can't really appreciate until you've finished them, and then you have to go back and re-read them. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was one of those for me, and The Remains of the Day too.
It makes me wonder whether everyone experiences these 'read-on' moments, and whether they're actually the same moments for everyone. And are they really the moments an author was fully confident that their story was going to work, or are they imposed upon the novel by the reader?
With my next new novel, not sure which one it's going to be, but I'll try to pick a good one, I'm going to try and keep track of this. I still have to finish reading about the 100-year-old first, although that does not seem like such a problem anymore now.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Distanced

There is an interview in the paper today with Jonathan Safran Foer. The headline tells us that it is about the movie that was made based on his novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but it is really about how people shouldn't attack books or authors because they have never hurt anybody, but that they should (verbally) attack politicians and terrorists instead. In between, Foer says that he watched the movie, that he liked it, but that he does understand why so many people hate it. He thinks it is because it is about 9/11, and people don't want to talk about that, or think about that, because it is too painful or because it will make them think about things that they just want to keep plain and simple.
Now I haven't actually seen the movie, but I've read enough about it to know what went wrong there. Any time Tom Hanks decides to quickly buy the film rights of a great novel, you should be very wary. He is not doing this because he loved the novel, or because he is afraid that somebody else will make a worse movie than he will, he is doing this because he knows it will make him a lot of money. And then he ensure that he himself will play the main character, which makes him even more money. Now in the novel, the story is divided in half between what the protagonist, Oskar Schell, tells us and letters that were written by his grandparents (to him or to his father). When I read that Tom Hanks was going to be in the movie, I imagined he would be playing the grandfather, which I thought was kinda neat, even though he was a little too young for that. Then I found out that they had actually scrapped the whole grandparents part of the story, just took them out, and somehow inserted Oskar's father back into the film, and that is who Hanks is playing. Now someone should really tell that guy that he is too old to play someone who is supposed to be in their early forties. But apart from that, his character is dead in the novel. That is the whole point of the novel. You can't go and put him back in, because everybody will know that the only reason you put him back in is because Tom Hanks is playing him. It is purely ego-tripping.
So Mr. Foer, I think most people are hating that movie not because of the subject matter, but because they ruined your book.
But I don't think that actually matters much to him. As he says in the interview, he knows why they changed things. They made a Hollywood blockbuster and those are supposed to appeal to a lot of people (which isn't really working out here, but okay). He would have made an arthouse movie, when given the chance. But he wasn't given the chance, and so he didn't participate in any way in the making of this film. He even says that when he watched in cinema, he cried at the end of the film, while he doesn't cry about his book (which I thought was magical, because I think few people can read that book and not cry). So really, he doesn't see it as his story anymore, it is just some Hollywood film about family and a search and memories and death and he was moved by that and it made him cry. End of story.
I think that is great. As a writer, you must be able to let go of your stories and have others tell them, perhaps in a slightly different way, because a story can never belong to you, it is just the way you told it that belongs to you, but all the rest of it is free to be told over and over again. Now the way Foer told the story, with his experimental use of photos and type and colour and letters and thoughts, is something that you can never put in a film, but also something that is uniquely him. So I think he is one of those few people who can rest assured that nobody is going to "steal" his story, because he is the only one who could have told it exactly that way. And he does rest assured. He clearly shows that this movie doesn't have that much to do with his novel, as far as he is concerned.
Maybe the rest of us should do the same, just don't think too much about how great and wonderful and innovative that novel is, but just go and watch the movie as if it is a fresh telling of a fresh story (I try to do this with most films that are made of novels, but sometimes you just can't help and go "Seriously? You didn't understand a thing about that novel! Whyyy did you spoil that for me??" But hey, that just shows how much you care, right?). My guess is that we will be happier all around.