Books of 2020

So this was a funny year. Enough has been said about that in many other places, but compiling the list of books I've read this year brought the message home again; the virus and the following lockdown had their effect on the books I've read this year too. Funny how you don't notice that when you're in the middle of things.
I read 29 books this year, which is slightly higher than my average of the past years. Some of these were pretty lengthy, but to compensate I read some really short ones too, so the overall page number should be comparable. The amount of rereads is much higher than it was in other years, and I think there you can see the corona effect; most of the year it was impossible to just wander into a bookshop and browse, so I had to make do with what was already on my bookshelves. 

Anyway, before I dive into the analysis, let's first look at the complete list:

1 Sweet Sorrow

2 Levels of Life

3 Koning van Katoren

4 Northanger Abbey

5 Girl, Woman, Other

6 Het wonder van Frieswijk

7 One Day

8 The Count of Monte Christo

9 Spring

10 Dune

11 The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying up

12 Leah on the Off Beat

13 How to be both

14 Pleidooi tegen enthousiasme

15 Het water komt

16 Piep

17 Wild

18 Eat pray love

19 The Accidental

20 Grote Verwachtingen

21 The Bone Clocks

22 The Testaments

23 Stoorzender

24 The Underground Railroad

25 Het recht van de snelste

26 Just like you

27 Pride & Prejudice and Misletoe

28 Me & Mr Darcy

29 The Rosie Project

Wow, I did not end on a high note, that's for sure. The stream of reread romantic novels stems from the illness I had in the beginning of December, which drove me to reading quick and easy novels. Not that one should make excuses for reading something light every now and then, but seeing three of them grouped together looks a bit sorry.

Anyway, more rereads than ever, as I said; Koning van Katoren, Northanger Abbey, One Day, Eat pray love, The Bone Clocks, and the final 3 romantic novels make 8 rereads in total. Only one 'classic' novel, The Count of Monte Christo, which in page number probably equals all the rereads. Unless you want to count Dune amongst the classics too, of course. Lots of Ali Smith (Spring, How to be both and The Accidental), which is probably no surprise since I put her as my best 'new' author of 2019. I was planning on ready more from Anna Burns too, but I didn't get her first novel until Christmas, so she will have to wait until 2021.

Best English novel

1 Spring

2 How to be both

3 Girl, Woman, Other

This category was pretty hard this year, mainly because I read so many rereads, non-fiction works and plainly bad books. But there were some great ones in there too. 

Spring is of course by the lovely Ali Smith, the third instalment of her seasonal novels. I am very much looking forward to the final novel (which is already out but not in the edition I need to complete my quartet), as I read an interview with her in which she states all the connections between the novels should become clear then (apart from some references to Shakespeare, classical musicians and contemporary artists that she already pointed out in the article and which I've missed so far anyway). How to be both is also by Ali Smith, making it the first time two novels from the same author find their way into my top 3. But Spring is definitely the better of the two. I read Girl, Woman, Other first of all these novels, which puts it in danger of slipping away in the mind, which it sort of did. It was one of the Man Booker prize winners of 2019 (look for the other one down below) so maybe it should have stuck with me more than it did. Anyway, it was still a great novel, a female view on contemporary Britain.

Honourable mention goes out to Just Like You by Nick Hornby, who just didn't make the cut.

I've just had a quick look back, and this is the first year that all novels in my top 3 were written by a woman. This may be a reflection of my changes in reading preferences, or it may be a reflection of me not buying books that have come out by male authors I usually love to read, such as Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell, The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes or State of the Union by Nick Hornby.

Best Dutch novel

The only Dutch novel I read that could go in this category is Koning van Katoren, which is a reread (Het Wonder van Frieswijk is also a Dutch children's book but it is so thin it is more a novella). All the other Dutch books I read this year were non-fiction.

Best classic

1 The Count of Monte Christo

If you only read one classic novel, the outcome is easily predicted. But I really liked this novel, as I've written before; despite the huge number of pages I flew through. Must really read more by Dumas in next year.

Best non-fiction

1 Grote Verwachtingen

2 Piep

3 Stoorzender

So these are all Dutch and wildly differing in their topic and size; Grote Verwachtingen is a pretty sizeable book on the years 2000-2019, which I started somewhere in 2019 and just finished this year. It is a nice read, a good follow-up to In Europa 1900-2000, but it took me a while to get through. Piep on the other hand is a really small collection of stories by biologist Midas Dekkers, in which he combines biology and (Dutch) literature; two of my favourite things. Stoorzender is an autobiography of one my favourite comedians (to name just one of the categories you can put him in) Arjen Lubach. Funnily enough, when the theatres were open, I heard several bits of this book spoken aloud by him without even knowing there was a book coming up. The bits he read out were the best bits of the book, it must be said. 

I have been reading three non-fiction books in English for the last couple of weeks, I put them down because of the illness but will probably finish them sometime early 2021, so next year this list will probably include more English titles.

Best short-story collection

I read no short story collections at all this year, something I just realised when putting in this category. I have several ready to read now, so this will be amended next year, but it is a sad realisation.

Best scifi/fantasy

1 Dune

Again, if you only read one... But this novel too was better than expected; really one of the classics in terms of character/society/plot building.

Best 'new' author

1 Bernardine Evaristo

Again, this was not a good year for finding new novels or authors. But I really liked Girl, Woman, Other from Bernardine Evaristo and have bought several of her older novels. So she is still a good new addition to my literary perspective.

Most disappointing novel

1 The Testaments

2 Sweet Sorrow

3 The Underground Railroad

So this was a toss up between the first two. I've written about my disappointment with The Testaments and Sweet Sorrow before, so I won't repeat myself except to say that Atwood gets first place because I expected so much more from her novel. I've read not-so-great novels by David Nicholls before, but never a novel by Atwood that was this bad. It makes me sad, putting two authors I generally like in the disappointing pile, but I've done the same in 2018 and 2019, so maybe their writing styles and my tastes are starting to grow apart somewhat. The Underground Railroad makes third place not because it was so bad, but because it could have been so much better. Again, it is all to do with the expectations you have; The Nickel Boys was my favourite novel of 2019 and Whitehead was in my list of best 'new' authors.

Honourable mention goes out to Levels of Life by Julian Barnes, which I haven't written about, had actually forgotten I'd read until I started to compile this list and then had to look up for what it was about. This is not a good sign, for a novel and a novelist that I've enjoyed so much before.

Authors I read more than once

Ali Smith (3x)

David Nicholls (2x)

The Testaments

Finally, The Testaments, that other Man Booker winner from that strange year where there were two. I'd read Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo in April already, but had to wait for this Atwood novel to come out in paperback. Yes, yes, I'm one of those people, who wants all their novels to be the same binding and size so they line up prettily in their bookcases. The fact that Atwood moved her novels from the publisher with the little apple on the side to Vintage has been bugging me for a couple of books now; everything lines up nicely until we get to The heart goes last. Which is her most disappointing novel, for more than one reason.

Anyway, The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale nobody actually saw coming. I'd heard so much about this novel already, from reviews and interviews and analyses of why there were two Man Booker winners, that it felt like I already knew what it was going to be about. Added to that, The Handmaid's Tale has become a tv series (or rather; internet series, in my case) which must have influenced the novel in some way. Maybe not for Atwood while she was writing it, but at least for me while I was reading it. So I knew I would be travelling back to Gilead, the dystopian future-USA where after a coup by religious extremists society has been turned upside down.

I also already knew that the novel consisted of the writings of three females from after the events of The Handmaid's Tale, and that one of these women was the dreadful Aunt Lydia. Now in the tv series Aunt Lydia is more horrendous than she is in the novel, at least in my memory, for in the novel there are more named Aunts. So I thought she would be an interesting character to find out more about; why her beliefs had led her to become who she was and act the way she does. Sadly, none of that. We find out (spoiler alert here) that Aunt Lydia doesn't even belief in all the Gilead social rules. She isn't a founding member, or even a convert. She just wanted to save her own skin.

That made me really sad. This way, the character is on the same side as the reader, which deprives us of understanding how that society came to be. Why not delve into the minds of some one who really believes these actions, these social constraints, the foundation of this society?  Of course, women aren't considered very capable in these circles, but the tv series solved this by having one of the Wives as one of the founding members, who really stood for her beliefs, and was slightly horrified but also accepting when she discovered what that did to her own position in society. I can see how Atwood wanted to keep her story as her own and not copy the tv premise, but having Aunt Lydia as a sort of double agent, working her way to bring about the downfall of Gilead, is just a cheap act to save yourself from writing someone truly evil. (Incidentally, I read in an interview with some crime writers that they never write a fully evil person, as readers don't want to see someone who is evil without a justifiable cause. So there always has to be a bad childhood experience or other external factor that causes someone to become evil. Same goes for Aunt Lydia; she suffered at the outset of Gilead and that turned her against her fellow women to save her own skin. As I said, a missed chance). This way, the whole Gilean society remains as unplausible as it was in 1985.

The other two 'writers' are two younger women, one living in Gilead and one in Canada. Their stories are very exposition-heavy, combined with teenage voices and thoughts. The one in Gilead was somewhat interesting, because she actually bought into the whole social system (not having a lot of other options since she was born there), until she found out what it would mean for her life as a Wife. With the added elements of peer pressure, group dynamics in adolescent girls, and her genuine surprise at the hypocricy of Gilean high society made her story quite interesting. The Canadian girl was a typical teenager, far less believable, mostly because she was as flat as a board. She had no personality and functioned mainly as an outside-in view of Gilead, until events took over and she actually became a playing piece for the plot to move forward.

Ah, the plot. More than any other Atwood novel, this one is very plot driven. Actions are set into motion, most of them deliberately by Aunt Lydia, and they propel towards an inevitable end. This plot focus feels at odds with the form of the novel, the written personal accounts. Personal accounts, I might add, which in two of the three characters describe actions that happened some time ago.  Because the writings date from after the action, we already know they are going to survive the main part of the story. Again, not a smart choice in a novel that is so focussed on what is happening and tries to build some kind of suspense in the outcome. I didn't feel that suspense once; we already knew a happy ending was on its way.

I finished the novel over a week ago, but put off writing this review hoping that I'd find some second thought, some extra layer or depth of meaning to add something to the experience of reading it. Sadly, there isn't really one. Sure, this is a feminist novel with some pretty strong female characters, and the message is crystal clear, but that's about it. The characters are flat and uninteresting, the plot is unrealistic and uninspired and there are no deeper questions or insights into the how, or why a society like Gilead ever came into being. Readers will feel relief at that it eventually ended, but if that is the main reason for awarding Margaret Atwood a Man Booker prize, I can think of some other novels that should have gotten one too, starting with Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows. 

So maybe we should think of this as the Man Booker making up for the fact they didn't give her one for The Handmaid's Tale, a novel that shows far more depth of character, psychology and society. Since that is still one of the best novels from the last 50 years (one that didn't need a sequel at all, mind you), I'll grant Atwood that. But let's forget about this unnecessary, blown-out-of-proportions sequel as fast as we can.

Books of 2019

Yes, it's that time of the year again! I was hoping, as always, to add another book to this list, but since that isn't going to happen this year, I may as well post this when the year has still one more day to go. So, I managed to finish 26 books this year, which keeps up my average quite nicely, at a book every 2 weeks. The list is pretty varied, I made some book resolutions a while ago, which I never updated in my books of 2018 post, but of course I didn't think of those as I picked my novels. I discovered some new writers this year, had some big disappointments from writers I love, and overall read more Dutch books than I've done in recent years.

So, without further ado, the complete list:
1 Milkman
2 Conversations with friends
3 Early Riser
4 Taal voor de leuk
5 Alias Grace
6 Friday Black
7 Machines like me
8 There there
9 Warlight
10 Naar de overkant van de nacht
11 Autumn
12 The Most Dangerous Place on Earth
13 Simon vs the Homosapiens agenda
14 Ferrera
15 Winter
16 How to
17 Calypso
18 The Catcher in the Rye
19 The Nickel Boys
20 Kruistocht in Spijkerbroek
21 The Cockroach
22 Maar je ziet er helemaal niet autistisch uit
23 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
24 De meeste mensen deugen
25 Asymmetry
26 Speeddaten met Plato

Just two rereads this year, the Harry Potter novel and Kruistocht in Spijkerbroek. Only one 'classic' novel, too; I'd never read The Catcher in the Rye before. Only a couple books by what I'd call my 'usual suspect' authors; Atwood, McEwan. I would have liked to read some books by Julian Barnes or Graham Swift, but somehow they didn't make their way into my bookcase this year. But on the other hand, I read lots of novels by new authors, either debut novels or new authors to me, which I mostly loved. I've written about several of these already, but let's put some of them into lists.

Best English novel
1 The Nickel Boys
2 Milkman
3 Autumn
So many great books this year. So, so many. But I think this will have to be the list for this year. Surprisingly, these are all authors I've never read before. I read several 'unheard' American voices this year, and Colson Whitehead's novel was the last. I think it was also the best, but maybe that is because I read it last. The Nickel Boys tells a horrible story in a beautiful way. Of all the novels I read this year, it is the one that is still on my mind some days. In contrast, Milkman was my very first read of 2019, and also the winner of the 2018 Man Booker. A deserved win, in my eyes. I don't think I've ever seen pages this densely packed, while getting through the novel at such speed. It is heavy, both in language and subject matter, but the story flows beautifully. Finally, of course, Autumn, by my big discovery Ali Smith. Less heavy subject matter, but giving the sense of togetherness in the novel, contrasted to the recent Brexit events, it will probably become a classic read at some point in time.
While reading them, I was expecting to put Conversations with friends or There there in my best novel list of this year, but overall it was such a great year, other novels found their way to the top. Honourable mentions to both, then.

Best Dutch novel
1 Kruistocht in spijkerbroek
2 Naar de overkant van de nacht
So most Dutch books I read this year were non-fiction, but I read 3 novels, one of which can be found under 'most disappointing' below. So Kruistocht in Spijkerbroek, or Crusade in Jeans, was the children's book sold cheaply this year (Dutch booksellers pick one childrens's book every year to promote reading). I love this novel when I first read it around age 10, and I love it still. Reading it as an adult makes you see loads of things you never realised when you were a child, but that doesn't make the novel any less good. Apparently someone made a film out of this novel, but I'd never watch that, for fear of ruining the images I have in my head. The second novel, Naar de overkant van de nacht, I started reading somewhere in 2017 or 2018, but I found it a pretty hard novel to get through. It's about a man celebrating carnival and thinking about his life. It felt a bit too heavy, too symbolic for my taste, which may explain why it took me so long to get through a novel less than 120 pages long.

Best classic
1 The Catcher in the Rye
If you're the only classic I read, you're going to end up on top. I liked this novel, but reading it after reading several stories featuring contemporary teenagers, Holden does turn out to be a bit of a whiner.

Best non-fiction
1 How to
2 De meeste mensen deugen
3 Taal voor de leuk
Right, enough has be said about How to in the accompanying blogpost. The second book, De meeste mensen deugen, is by Rutger Bregman, who has been getting some international attention due to his comments on the World Economic Forum in Davos. He's written a couple of books already, some of which have been translated into English. I'm pretty sure this novel will be translated as well. It focusses on human nature, specifically on how Hobbes and Rousseau both had opposing views on the matter. As the title (Most people are good) says, Bregman believes people are innately good, it takes a whole lot of effort or desperation to make someone commit criminal and/or violent acts. Being an optimistic person, I loved his view on things, especially the debunking of psychological studies that have become basic knowledge but now turn out to be based on faulty data or assumptions. Taal voor de leuk is by Paulien Cornelisse and features some of her columns on the Dutch language and the way people talk.

Best autobiographical
1 Maar je ziet er helemaal niet autistisch uit
2 Calypso
I realise these are technically also non-fiction, but as I read so many non-fiction novels, most of which I didn't write about here, I wanted to put in another short category. Maar je ziet er helemaal niet autistisch uit is by Bianca Toeps, who describes her life as an autistic person. She explains how certain things work, where certain traits come from, and how best to interact with autistic people. Some of the things she described were very recognisable, sometimes scarily so. I haven't been diagnosed, but I think this is a good read for everyone looking for a bit of recognition or reassurance. Calypso is a collection of columns by David Sedaris; I've never actually read any of his novels, but a friend gave me this book for my birthday. I enjoyed reading about his life, although it got a bit repetitive at times, as columns published months apart were now pushed together.

Best short-story collection
1 Friday Black
The only short-story collection I read, but a great one. Too bad there wasn't more of it.

Best fantasy/scifi
The only novels I read that could be considered scifi are sadly in the most disappointing list.

Best 'new' author
1 Ali Smith
2 Anna Burns
3 Colson Whitehead
So this is the other way around from my 'best English novel' list. Why so? Well, I liked Whitehead's novel best, but his voice maybe a bit less so. I'm looking forward to reading The Underground Railroad, but it isn't at the top of my list (it wasn't even on my 'books to buy' list until five minutes ago). Anna Burns has written two other novels, both of which I'm very curious about, and both of which are pretty hard to find. But if they're anything like Milkman, I'm in. Ali Smith, the most famous of the authors, has published the third instalment in her seasonal series, Spring, but it isn't in the right format yet. Yes, I'm one of those people who wants the whole series to be in the same edition. So I'll have to wait for that one, but luckily she's also written How to be both, and several other novels already. Her voice, the way she tells her stories, makes me very curious for more.

Most disappointing novel
1 Machines like me
2 Early Riser
3 Ferrera
The first two novels in this category can hardly come as a surprise. I wrote extensively about my disappointment with Ian McEwan's novel about living together with a robot. Thankfully he made up for it by The Cockroach, but Machines like me remains the biggest disappointment of the year. Closely followed, second only because McEwan is my favourite author, by Early Riser. We've been waiting for the sequel to Shades of Grey for years now, and Jasper Fforde decides to write a horrible novel like this! Again, I've vented my disappointment in an earlier post, but this also still smarts. The third novel is the long-awaited sequel to Ventoux by Bert Wagendorp. Ventoux, which I read before 2015, if my book lists tell the truth, was a great novel about renewing a boyhood friendship. Ferrera finds these 'boys' now in the middle of mid-life crises, packing up to go to Ferrara Italy. It feels like Wagendorp had a mid-life crisis while writing the novel, and it didn't do him any good. It was uninspiring, with flat characters, meaningless sideplots and a pointlessly dramatic ending. Again, after waiting for so long for a new novel, it was a big disappointment.

Authors I read more than once:
- Ali Smith (2x)
- Ian McEwan (2x)

Alias Grace

So, Margaret Atwood. I may have mentioned before that she is a great author. Recently series producers have also discovered this, so The Handmaid's Tale is now a famous thing. Which is good. I loved that novel, and I like the series too, now that it's drifted away from the plot of the novel a bit. It is a universe that can stand on its own. Also, she is apparently publishing a sequel, The Testaments, later this year.
Another of her novels that made it to the screen is Alias Grace. Now I haven't seen the series, but the novel has been on my bookshelf for quite a while, and I decided this was the time to read it. I knew nothing about it beforehand, except that it was about a murder case from the 1840, in which Grace Marks was convicted for killing her employer and fellow maid at the age of 15. She was not executed, but remained imprisoned for most of her life.
Without going into too much detail about the plot; I loved this novel. It is typical Atwood; we have a smart, independent female protagonist who finds her way in the world. She talks about herself and her history in such a way that you can never be fully sure that she is telling the truth, or even that she knows what the truth actually is. She has her flaws, but that makes her human.
The other characters in the novel are not as fleshed-out. I thought Simon Jones would become another conflicted, complex character he turned out to be quite conventional and predictable. But the novel is about Grace, and she is engaging, the story is engaging, nothing much happens and still you keep on wanting to read more. Everything that annoyed me about The Heart goes Last was done right here. Also, the novel contains poems, witness accounts, all kinds of other materials that give it substance and context.
In the end, Atwood let's us decide for ourselves whether Grace actually committed the murders. The historical accounts don't fully convince either way, and I feel she fictionalised them very neutrally. At 500+ pages it is a pretty heavy tome, which is one of the few downsides. It took me a while to get through this novel, not because it was difficult, but because it was a lot to take in.
Next up in Atwood land are more of her earlier novels, since I somehow seem to be working backwards through her works. I hope they are just as good, and maybe a little bit thinner!

Books of 2018

I was hoping to add another book to this list, but it seems I will not finish reading it before the year is out, and also it is too beautiful a book to hurry up the reading, so I will make that my first book of 2019. I made a films of 2018 list a couple of days ago, in case films are more your thing.
But back to books: 2018 was a year with a nice variety of readings, more varied than my books of 2017 list. Also, a lot longer: I read 29 books this year, which is 6 up from last year. Again, I didn't read a long classic novel (although they are still on the to-read list) and also I quit reading a couple of books that took me too long to get through. If I have little time to read, I want to spend that time with books I actually like.

So, my complete 2018 list:
1 Lincoln in the bardo
2 Uncommon type
3 The heart goes last
4 The English patient
5 The sense of an ending
6 The ocean at the end of the lane
7 De zeven wetten van de liefde
8 The blind assassin
9 Murder on the Orient Express
10 The ABC murders
11 The noise of time
12 Fahrenheit 541
13 The Penelopiad
14 The view from the cheap seats
15 The garden party
16 All Change
17 The Liar
18 A handful of dust
19 Seveneves
20 The Children Act
21 My purple scented novel
22 The diary of a bookseller
23 Far from the madding crowd
24 Call me by your name
25 The only story
26 Shades of Grey
27 Normal people
28 Het bestverkochte boek ooit
29 Pride & prejudice & mistletoe

So, four rereads: The ocean at the end of the lane, The Liar, The Children Act and Shades of Grey, all by some of my favourite male authors (Gaiman, Fry, McEwan and Fforde). Two Dutch books, which are both non-fiction. I started reading two Dutch novels, but put both of those down as they didn't engage me enough. Will have to try again next year.
I had a couple of book resolutions for 2017 and 2018; stop reading of I don't like the novel, fewer rereads, read more great new authors such as Margaret Atwood. Also, as I was short on these last year; read more Dutch novels, short stories, non-fiction, and more new female authors. Some of those worked out, some clearly didn't. Despite the 'rules' I was really hoping for new novels by Ian McEwan or David Mitchell, but not having those I read more by new discoveries such as Julian Barnes, Margaret Atwood of course, and my newest love; Sally Rooney. Also, I read four Man Booker prize winners this year (Lincoln in the bardo (2017), The sense of an ending (2011), The English patient (1992) and The blind assassin (2000)), which makes 2018 a year filled with some of the best novels ever written.

Anyway, let's look at some lists:

Best English novel
1 Normal people
2 The sense of an ending
3 The English patient
So many great novels this year! This list was hard to make, also because novels that I've read more recently seem to stick in the memory better than those I read in January or February. But I managed to bring it down to three novels. But the undisputed number one is Normal People by Sally Rooney. I haven't been this happy reading a novel in a very long time. The Sense of an Ending makes a close second, though. Julian Barnes was a 2018 find, and I actually read three of his novels this year. The Sense of an Ending was the first and by far the best. It is one of those deeply emotional, tragic without being dramatic, stories about someone finally realising how much they've been deceiving themselves all of their life. As I wrote in February; This is a novel you can pull out each year, read again, and still find new bits in it. I will leave it alone for a couple of years, and then time will tell whether that is true. The last novel on the best novel list is another Man Booker winner (Normal People was merely longlisted, which is a shame, although I am now reading the 2018 Man Booker winner Milkman and can see how that is even better than Normal People) and another novel I read in February. The English patient, an instant classic I'd somehow missed all this time. I was watching Bodyguard on Netflix yesterday and it got me thinking about The English patient, so much so that I had to rewind because I'd been reminiscing so much. That is what a good novel does to you; it sticks with you, and you remember it while watching or reading other great things.
Honourable mentions on this list go to The Blind Assassin and Call me by your name, which didn't make the list but are still great novels.

Best Dutch novel
Non-existent this year

Best classic
1 Fahrenheit 541
2 Far from the madding crowd
3 A handful of dust
As always, one can argue here when a novel counts as a 'classic'. Last year, the oldest novels I read were over 20 years old but didn't feel as classics because they were still so current. This year, I felt like putting The English patient here, only to find out that novel is actually from 1992. Strange, how some novels feel much older than they are, while others are exactly the opposite.
Anyway, the novels I put in are from 1953, 1874 and 1934. I could also have put the Agatha Christie novels I read, as they're also from the 1930s, but I liked these less. Fahrenheit 541 is the newest novel on the list and my biggest discovery of 2018. I still can't explain how I missed this novel up until actually reading it (because Neil Gaiman mentioned it in The view from the cheap seats) but there you are. Read this novel, if you haven't already. Far from the madding crowd is a Thomas Hardy novel, which makes it a classic in its own right, but also a book to be shunned if you studied English literature and wrestled through Jude the Obscure, as I did. But as it turns out, this is a far nicer read. A handful of dust is also one of those fallen-through novels; one of my friends actually wrote here thesis on Evelyn Waugh and I never bothered to read any of the novels in it, except for Brideshead revisited a couple of years ago. I liked that better, A handful of dust is a bit too cynical and nasty for my taste, but still a good read.

Best non-fiction
1 The view from the cheap seats
2 The diary of a bookseller
3 Het bestverkochte boek ooit
I'm not sure if The view from the cheap seats counts fully as non-fiction, as with Neil Gaiman you can never be sure, but it by far the best non-fiction I read this year. The diary of a bookseller follows the life of a bookseller in the biggest bookshop in Scotland, which was a revealing, if somewhat narcissistic, read. Het bestverkochte boek ooit is by De Correspondent, the Dutch non-news news website that is expanding into the USA to bring the news that is not the current, actual, hyped up news but the stories behind the news, the events slowly unfolding. This book is about our obsession with numbers and what they actually mean.

Best short-story collection
1 Uncommon type
2 The garden party
Not a lot of short-story collections this year, but more than in 2017, when there were none. Uncommon type was a big surprise this year; it turns out Tom Hanks can actually write a pretty decent story! The second short-story collection I read was by Katherine Mansfield. I read The Garden Party (the story from the title) for my English lit studies, when again it was one of those timeless stories that feel still current, even though it was written in 1922. The rest of the stories are nice reads, but not as memorable as Tom Hanks' book.

Best fantasy/scifi
1 Seveneves
2 The Penelopiad
Not a lot of fantasy or scifi to go around this year, and Shades of Grey counts as a reread, but these two deserve some kind of mention. Seveneves is a scifi novel that taught me more I ever thought to know about the ISS, living in space, space physics and building a new world. The Penelopiad is Margaret Atwood's interpretation of the Odyssee myth. This may not count as fantasy in the strictest sense of the word, but I do want to mention it because of her very human and real characters.

Best 'new' author
1 Sally Rooney
2 Julian Barnes
3 Michael Ondaatje
This list can hardly come as a surprise. Will read more of these authors whenever I can.

Most disappointing novel
1 All change
2 The heart goes last
3 The only story
This list always hurts. This year, it contains three of my favourite 'new' authors; Elizabeth Jane Howard, Margaret Atwood and Julian Barnes. I've said all I ever wanted to say on All change. The heart goes last was my most disappointing Atwood novel this year; compared to The Blind Assassin or The Handmaid's tale it feels rushed, with stock characters and a stock message. The same is true for The Only Story; Julian Barnes's newest novel. I had actually forgotten what it was about, but reading the blurb it all came back to me; the failed relationship of characters I didn't actually care about. Especially reading it directly following Call me by your name, which depicts a blossoming relationship in all its lovely longing, this novel made me thoroughly sad. I hope to pick up better novels by Atwood (Alias Grace is still waiting) and Barnes next year, as it hurts me to put authors I usually really love in this list.

Authors I read more than once:
- Margaret Atwood (3x)
- Julian Barnes (3x)
- Agatha Christie (2x)
- Neil Gaiman (2x)
- Ian McEwan (2x)

Penelopiad

Margaret Atwood is a great author. I may have mentioned this before, but my admiration seems to be developing in the direction of a full-on literary girl-crush.
So I've been reading Mythos by Stephen Fry, his retelling of the Greek myths. And while mr Fry is great, and his writing style is light and humorous, I seem to be unable to get through the book at any speed. It's more a series of leaps and bounds, with long periods of reading-something-else in between. These thousand year old stories remain a bit dry and dusty, even in the hands of modern writers.
Then I came across The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, a retelling of the Illiad/Odyssey from Penelope's (Odysseus's wife) perspective. Aparently Canongate does a myth-retelling series, in which they ask a couple of great authors (including Phillip Pullman, Ali Smith, A.S. Byatt) to retell a myth from a contemporary perspective. So far, they're at 9 stories, but the aim is to get to 100 in the end.
They were smart enough to ask Margaret Atwood to do one right in the beginning, which gave the whole series a boost. And Atwood wouldn't be Atwood if she didn't give the whole thing a truly feminist twist (although she disagrees with that classification, saying that it was just written from the point of view of a woman). So Penelope is the main character, telling us the story from the realm of Hades, which is firmly set in the 21st century.
Now I hadn't gotten to the Odyssey bit in Mythos, but the story is well-known: it took Odysseus quite a while to get home from Troy, fighting monsters and sleeping with goddesses, while in the meantime his wife waited faithfully, surrounded by dozens of suitors trying to claim Odysseus's kingdom. Or, in other versions of the story, Penelope went all-out with these suitors. In The Penelopiad, she explains that she was just trying to survive the best she could. She is neither sinner nor saint, she doesn't want to be put on a pedestal like Odysseus and his big stories (the cyclops was just a one-eyed guy in a drunken bar fight, according to her), she was just a woman trying to get by.
Another element to the story are the twelve maids hanged by Odysseus upon his return. In the 'official' version, these maids were working together with the suitors and had to be hanged for their treason. In this version, Penelope reveals she asked the maids to spy on the suitors and work with her to help her get by. She never gets a chance to explain this to Odysseus before he hangs the girls. However, Penelope's chapters are interspersed by 'chorus' chapters in which the maids give their point of view, which throws yet another light on the story. But still the double standards are clearly there: the maids sleeping with the suitors earns them a hanging, while Odysseus sleeping with a goddess earns him praise.
Finally, Penelope has some beef with her cousin Helen, who of course started the whole Trojan war by running off with Paris. Helen continuous to haunt her in the underworld, showing up with throngs of suitors still following her. What it comes down to, is Penelope being jealous at Helen for being more beautiful and revered than herself. Given both their back stories, this is completely recognisable and it makes me like Penelope more as a character. She did her best trying to keep Odysseus's kingdom together while he was away, but in the end, she doesn't feel as good about herself as Helen, who does nothing but play men against each other. It should be the other way around, but as with so many relationships, things are not that logical.
The Penelopiad took me about two days of reading to get through. It is not dry, it is not dusty. It is the story of a woman trying to explain why she did what she did, firmly set in our time but describing events of three thousand years ago. And it is completely recognisable; this is a human character, with human actions and flaws. Maybe that is what makes these Greek myths slow reading; all these super-human characters who get away with everything gets boring after a while. We like superheroes best if they show some sort of flaw, some weak point that makes them more human. This is what Margaret Atwood did; she gave a human perspective on a non-human situation. And I tend to agree with her; that doesn't make the story feminist, it just gives another point of view. Something we could use more often, in classical literature. I hope the rest of the Canongate series is as good as this, for these stories, dusted and renewed, still deserve to be retold for many years to come.

The Blind Assassin

So April wasn't just write, write, write, I also did some reading. Not a lot, mind you, most of the reading of The Blind Assassin took place in March, as this book took a long time to get through. Not because I didn't like it, mind you, but because this is one heavy book. It's 600+ pages, filled with one of the saddest stories I've read in a long time. Margaret Atwood is known for her dystopian novels and this is no exception, but this story takes place in our world. It could actually have happened. Maybe that is what gives it weight over The Handmaid's Tale or Oryx & Crake; this novel deals with places and events that actually were real, so it may well have really happened.
So, what is it about? As the blurb tells us, 10 days after WWII ended, Laura Chase drove herself off a bridge. In the novel, her sister Iris describes the events leading up to Laura's suicide, writing a diary fifty years after this happened, when she is the sole survivor of the events that took place. Interspersed with the 'diary' Iris keeps are chapters filled with other written sources; letters, obituaries, news articles, and most importantly, The Blind Assassin itself, the novel published after Laura's death.
In their youth, for that is how far back Iris goes, they lived a live of luxury; their father owned some big factories and they were the rich family of the village. Their mother died when they are quite young, but otherwise they appear to be the typical upper-class ladies you find in so many novels, educated at home, snubbing their teachers, being a star at social events, etc. This isn't another one of those 'Downton Abbey' novels, however, for they quickly fall down the social ladder when the Depression hits. Their father should close the factories but can bring himself to fire his employees, thus only worsening his own situation. There are rumours of Communists in the ranks and Iris and Laura hide one of these rebellious youths in the attic. To save himself, their father decides to marry Iris off to his main competitor, only to find that the guy didn't keep his end of the bargain. Iris never discloses much about her marriage, but we can read between the lines that it wasn't a happy one.
Then WWII hits, and you can feel the story nearing its climax, with a plot twist that shimmers beneath the lines for at least 100 pages, but you can't really lay a finger on until it hits you. Somehow, all the written sources, all the articles and novel excepts and diary fragments combine to form one great narrative. I reread some of the earlier bits as I neared the end, but this is one of those novels you should reread after you've finished, just to pick up on the hints that must be hidden in the pages.
In short; it is one of those novels that stays with you. A deserved Booker Prize winner, and as such it ticked two of my reading goals for this year; read more Atwood and read more Booker Prize winners. But it also ticks the box of a great story, told with understated feeling, with such imagery that I feel like some of the events actually happened before my eyes, as if they are memories rather than words written down. Now on to happier stories!

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)

Hag-seed

To make good on my promise to myself to read more from certain lovable authors, I ditched the John le Carré novel and started in another Atwood novel; Hag-Seed. Now this is not just any novel; Hogarth is doing a series of Shakespeare-retellings by contemporary authors in contemporary settings, and Hag-Seed was inspired by The Tempest. Or rather, not just inspired by, it is basically the story of The Tempest, including a thwarted theatre director, who aims at getting revenge through staging The Tempest. This sounds very forced, and it probably could have been in the hands of a lesser author, but the novel is actually brilliantly constructed.
Before we get into that, let me get this out of the way; I have never read The Tempest, nor have I ever seen a staging of it. It was one of those 'we won't go there' plays during my studies, and it isn't one of the plays that ever shows up at the local theatre (or not-so-local Shakespeare theatre). There is apparently a film version with Helen Mirren as 'Prospera', but I managed to miss that too.
So, no prior knowledge of the play or the story, although I did read up on the main plotlines and themes on Wikipedia (I found out in the end that there is a short synopsis at the back of the novel, but I'm one of those people who stays very far from the final pages of any novel). Also, the main theme is pretty obvious from the get-go; revenge. The main character, Felix/Prospero, has been thwarted out of his profession as artistic manager of a Shakespeare festival, and now that he has fallen low, he wants his revenge. After an exile of twelve years (not unexpectedly the same amount of time elapses in The Tempest), he finally sees his chance when his former enemies visit the prison in which he now works in a Literacy through Literature programme. It isn't hard to persuade the juvenile delinquents to work with him to get his revenge, and the end result is somewhat disturbing, but also a very entertaining read.
The 'actors' are asked to add their own thoughts, scenes and songs to the play, resulting in some very nice raps (I never thought I would ever write the phrase 'very nice raps'), which gives a triple layer to this retelling (the original play, the novel-as-the-play, and the 'modernized' version they perform). Again, this might have been very forced, but even though you can see what will happen way in advance, the plot never gets in the way of the story. One funny thing that happened was that I kept thinking the play was set in England, and it took about a third of the book to realise it was actually set in the US. Somehow, 'Shakespeare festivals' feel like something Britain-only, and the whole novel oozed Britishness to me. (And then it turns out that Margaret Atwood is actually Canadian, so I have been putting her novels on the wrong shelf of my bookcase for years!)
Anyway, it's a great read, maybe less so if you're not a Shakespeare/theatre geek like me, but even then the whole development of the main character and his young actors will still bring a smile to your face. Amazing, how something that should have been very heavy and deep with Literary Meaning, can still be so very light and pleasant.

Books to go

A couple of months ago, I read an interview (I can't remember with who, or where) that has been haunting me ever since. It was with someone aged around 60, who had decided to only read new books, and about once or twice a year reread a book that he already knew he loved. Because, as he reasoned, he read only about 20 books per year, and as he had only about 20 more years to live (at least, that was the number he was aiming for) that made a grand total of 400 books left to read in his entire lifetime. He felt sorry that he hadn't read more great novels when he had the time (in his teens, twenties, and generally before he had a job or children) and now he wanted to make every book worthwhile.
Imagine that! I mean, it is a noble idea, of course, and great planning on his side, but the whole depressing thought of knowing how many books you're still going to read in your life, basically means saying 'no' to a lot of books, and closing the door on so many reading experiences. And when you read a new novel that you absolutely love, you automatically go 'aw, but I won't ever read you again, because I don't have enough slots left for rereads!' Horrible thought.

But still, the man had a point. I mean, my situation is not nearly as dire, as I am only 31, read 40 books per year, so with his projected life expectancy I would still have 2000 books to go, but I too have spent time reading novels I didn't enjoy, didn't think were going anywhere, or just read out of politeness to the person who lend it to me. I am terrible at not finishing a novel; once I've started, I feel like I am committed to finish it, no matter how awful I think it is. (Non-fiction is different, by the way, I have about 10 non-fiction books laying around with bookmarks stuck somewhere in the first 50 pages that I'm not sure I will ever finish.) But all those non-enjoyable books take up a lot of time. Even more time than the good ones, respectively, because I automatically read less when I don't like what I'm reading, so it takes more time to finish them.
So, time for a change.
In 2015, I gave myself the challenge of reading 52 books, and of only reading books I hadn't read before. I didn't make the number, but I did read all new novels. This is a great idea in principle, but some of those novels I did not enjoy. Still, I kept reading, to reach my goal. New rule from now one: if I don't like a novel, or feel myself avoiding reading, I will stop reading that novel and start something else.
Next up; rereads. I like rereads, especially during busy periods when my mind is too distracted to dive into a complex new novel; rereads are like a familiar warm bath that relax my brain and don't care if I miss out on some smaller details because I already know the main plot. During the renovation and move, I read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, for example. Which is great, but too many rereads get in the way of new novels. So; rereads are only allowed when needed.
Finally, I have several authors who are my absolute favourite and whose every new novel that comes out I read immediately. Examples include Ian McEwan and David Mitchell. There are also some authors who would probably make it onto that all-time-favourite-have-read-everything-will-read-every-new-novel-that-comes-out list, but who I keep forgetting about, until I by accident read another one of their novels, go 'this author is great, I should read more by them!' and then forget about them again. Examples include Margaret Atwood and Graham Swift. So, third new rule; read more novels by potential to-love authors.

As always with literature, I will probably break any rule I make within half a year, but they do give me some comfort with the depressing 'the end is neigh!' feelings I have been walking around with for a while. And if you'll excuse me, I will now get back to my John le Carré, a novel that I felt was sagging a bit in the middle, but did not put down, for, er... reasons.

The Handmaid's Tale

I loved The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer, which I read for some of my medieval literature classes. They are funny, to the point, highly descriptive of the society he found himself in; like a window on life as it was 700 years ago.
My most recent read, The Haindmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, could well be a lost Canterbury tale, only not set in a distant past, but in a strangely familiar parallel present. The US as we know it no longer exists, but has been overthrown in a religious rebellion during which the government was shot, the Constitution suspended, and ordinarily life made impossible. Although this is not true for everybody; it is mostly the women who suffer. They are not allowed to have jobs or property (including money) anymore, and must function as breeding machines or servants for the Commanders, the leaders of this group of religious rebels. From the flashbacks the main character has, this must all have taken place some time during the nineties, which in a weird way always gives me some sort of relief; the time described has already passed, so this will not come to pass.
Which is of course nonsense; the whole rebellion as it is described is thought out very carefully, and with a few smartly planted attacks and actions, the whole system collapses. And nobody really riots, or resists. And those that do resist are hanged publicly. So people fall into place, and into step, and try to forget the memories and ideas they used to have, and try to become the automated robots they have to be in order to survive in this new world.
To avoid any confusion, let me be clear on one thing; this religious group is in no way islamist. They are a Christian group, calling themselves the Sons of Jacob, who follow the Bible to the letter (the letter that they find suits their purposes best, of course, as the book has some internal conflicting passages). So no more abortions, alcohol, etc. Breeding is a woman's main purpose, and the protagonist (Offred, who is owned by Fred, thus Of-Fred) is kept as a Handmaiden by one of the Commanders, as his own Wife cannot conceive anymore. Monthly, he tries to impregnate her, to bring the declining population numbers up to scratch. This reads as awful as it sounds. But strangely enough, this is not the bit about the book that is most disturbing. What haunted me the most, apart from how easily everything changed, was the way the main character tried to brainwash herself, how much she tried to fit in in a society that she despised. Because there was no other way, except suicide, which she of course contemplates on several occasions.
Just as The Canterbury Tales shed light on daily life in the Middle Ages, so does Margaret Atwood analyze our society, and how little is needed to change it. The protagonist's mother was an avid feminist, but Offred took many things for granted, things that the generation before her had to fight to gain. The central message to us may be; if you don't know what you stand to loose, you won't fight as hard to keep it. It is a fascinating read, I was surprised to see it written in 1985, for it could be written yesterday given how relevant its themes still are. It is a thorough analysis and warning to us all.